TRAVERSE CITY -- Officials from rural townships want an investigation of the firm that designed Grand Traverse County's septage treatment plant before they agree to new taxes on their residents.
A proposed assessment, possibly as high as $40 a year, would be levied on owners of septic tanks in the county to help pay for the struggling $8 million facility. The plant was overbuilt and needs about four times the volume of septic tank waste it currently receives to be financially viable, a recent study concluded.
The study projects the plant will lose $2.4 million by 2014 without the assessment or other financial props.
"This primary solution is to come out to these rural townships who were told we are not going to have any responsibility for this (plant), and you are going to ask us to assess our people," Union Township Supervisor Doug Mansfield told the county board and its sewer and water committee during a Jan. 14 meeting. "This is just outrageous."
Mansfield served as chairman of the county's Board of Public Works early this decade during a study and approval of the treatment plant that opened in 2005 and immediately faced financial and construction woes. His support for the plant as BPW chairman relied on consultants' projections and "they were totally wrong," Mansfield said.
The septage flow projections were compiled by county engineering consultant Gourdie-Fraser Inc. and BPW attorney Michael Houlihan. Gourdie-Fraser later was hired to design the plant, and Houlihan was appointed project manager at a rate of $150 per hour.
Acme, Elmwood, East Bay, Peninsula and Garfield townships guaranteed the plant's bond payments, and supervisors from those townships ran the project under the umbrella of the Sewer and Water Committee.
"I was assured, and I was the only one who asked ... are you sure the numbers here work," Mansfield said.
Mansfield said Houlihan answered "in a very condescending tone" that the budget had so many built-in contingencies that it could not fail financially.
County Commissioner Beth Friend said she wants either an independent law firm or the county prosecutor to determine if Gourdie-Fraser has financial liability for its faulty projections. When she raised a similar question during the Jan. 14 meeting, it was met with silence.
"Before anything else can happen, you have to ask that question," Friend said. "Either the answer is yes, there is some responsibility or no, the projections were off but the project was reasonable."
Commissioner Larry Fleis asked Friend if the county should go after the authors of the most recent study if their numbers also are faulty.
The situations are far different, Friend countered.
"We are talking about (Gourdie-Fraser) projections that are so far off that it may not be reasonable to a professional in their own field," Friend said.
Mansfield said the county needs to find out went wrong before asking the rural townships for a bailout.
"I'm saying, ask the question before you come out to the rural townships, or tomorrow our mission will be to get the rural townships together and put up a wall," Mansfield said.
Septic flow projections were based on two years of surveying area haulers, said Jim Minster, project manager for Gourdie-Fraser.
"There was as much investigation into this that was humanly possible at that time to see if it was a viable project," Minster said. "We were dealing with information that is limited at best, but everybody involved in the whole project ... took the best information available to make the best judgment they could."
Minster acknowledged Gourdie-Fraser did not cross-check its projection of approximately 10 million gallons of local septage with other data gathered by the state. He said the state didn't have the information well-organized at the time.
Minster said septic flow survey information was gathered in the late 1990s into 2000.
Chris Buday, director of the county department of public works, said the townships didn't start looking at building a septage plant until 2002. An earlier septage plant effort died in 1997 over financial viability concerns, he said, and the earlier project data projected four million gallons of septage in the county from 20,000 septic tanks.
The county currently counts 23,000 septic tanks here that produce about four million gallons of septage.
Commissioner Larry Inman said it's up to the townships who hired Gourdie-Fraser to decide if an investigation is warranted.
"If an investigation discovers someone knowingly falsified information, then I think you'd have a claim," Inman said. "If you just flat out screw up and give wrong numbers based on your opinion, should you be held liable, I don't know. But I don't have a problem asking those two questions."
Inman, Fleis and Friend were appointed to a committee with township representatives to review recommendations from the recent study to implement a special assessment on septic tank owners.
