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Corrects newspaper article, county retrofit figures

Submitted by admin on Wed, 01/27/2016 - 9:39am

To the Editor:
I need to start by correcting the Jan. 20, 2016, Hutchinson Leader article titled, “Recycling facility costs grew and grew.” This article is in reference to the McLeod County single-sort recycling project.
The article states, “while on the County Board, former member Jon Christensen supported an increase from $3.5 million to $4.5 million on the facility project. He also agreed to bonding for it, citing the need to avoid draining the facility funds, so long as those funds repaid the bond.”
In reality, the McLeod County commissioners approved one-sort by a 3-2 vote, with commissioners Jon Christensen and Ron Shimanski voting no, as reported in the April 13, 2014, Hutchinson Leader. A maximum limit of $4.5 million was set at this board meeting. That total exceeds previous cost estimates by about $1 million. The preliminary estimates ranged between $2.8 million and $3.5 million.
The April 13, 2014, Leader continues, “‘The reason I voted no was because we had a workshop on (April 3, 2014),’ he said. ‘We got to that workshop and all of a sudden we are looking at more like $4.5 million. I didn’t feel comfortable, being that we were that far off, with moving ahead with it. It raised concerns for me. If we were that far off on those numbers,’ he said, ‘I wonder how far we were off on our other numbers.’”
It appears that my predictions for the McLeod County taxpayers were right, even going beyond the 10 percent built-in project contingency.
This raises some questions with the $5.04 million total just released by the County Board:
• The Hutchinson recycling facility fence that was required as a part of the conditional use permit for the expansion. Actually, the total cost for the fence, fence grading and site excavation were all caused by the one-sort project. This total is $182,711. Why wasn’t this expense accounted for in the initial estimate? Are we trying to hide numbers?
• The scale technology and software updates should also have been included because it was needed to operate the new scale that was part of the retrofit project. This amount was $65,169. Why couldn’t the two scales presently adjacent to the property be used?
• Where is the reported interest for the $5 million bond?
Is an external audit or investigation necessary to verify the financials of the single-sort recycling project?
To be continued …
Jon L. Christensen
Hutchinson