Several other take-aways from Friday’s retreat
Wake Forest is getting very, very fussy about what goes into its rollout recycling bins because the companies which reprocess or handle recycled items now do not anything that has contaminants in it. And they refuse to accept items like clear plastic clamshells.
“You mean the little boxes my blueberries come in?” asked an astonished Commissioner Jim Dyer as most of the rest of us gaped, equally astonished.
“Yes,” said Alison Snyder, the assistant public works director. She explained that China began rejecting recyclables with contaminants about two years ago, leading to a crash in the recycling business, which is constantly changing.
Now, she said, the town is trying to make sure it has better recyclables through better education. There are audits of the town’s recycling twice a year, and Wake Forest has a large percentage of contaminants and non-acceptable materials, 18 percent with the average throughout the U.S. is 12 percent.
If you are in doubt, she said, check the Waste Wizard on the town’s website.
Mayor Vivian Jones said she will ask, and the commissioners all agreed with her, not to spend any town money on plastic water bottles. Instead, for large events, they will have water stations with recyclable cups for those who do not bring their own bottles.
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The parks and recreation staff is tired. Not always, but they are being overworked and overextended by all the events sponsored by the town – currently 94 annual events or outreach – and that number does not include the events at the Renaissance Centre.
“We keep adding events, but we are not adding staff,” Ruben Wall, the director for parks, recreation and cultural resources, said. In addition, increasingly the board members of one of the town’s advisory boards are not willing to commit to volunteering to help with that board’s events.
“We are concerned about the quality of the events because it can put such a strain on the staff,” Wall said. There are weekends when there are two or three events that his staff or other town staff must do most of the heavy lifting – getting tents, tables and other items to the event site, setting up in advance, working at the event, then breaking down and taking everything back to storage. Those staff members also work regular weekday hours.
There is a request now for a gymnastics festival, Wall said.
Currently he is working with a temp agency to get some help.
Wall and Lisa Hayes, the downtown director who is in the thick of events every week, asked the commissioners to think about the situation and come up with some suggestions.
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Out at Unicon Drive, where the Wake Forest Power department has been relocated, Chris Terrell and others are thinking of ways to cut the cost of power to the town and eventually the customer.
Each month there is a grid-wide peak hour of usage across the Duke Power system, and it is costly. During off-peak hours the charge to the town for power is 3 cents per KW but for that one hour each month the charge is $22 per KW, or thousand kilowatt hours.
Wake Forest Power has been working for years to reduce the impact of that charge by cutting usage, and currently – and for about 20 years – the town does so by switching off power to large users and switching on their generators. Walmart, large grocery stores, large stores throughout the town, not all but a lot, have generators that will automatically switch on when Wake Forest Power operators see a peak may be coming.
Now Wake Forest Power is hoping to be able to use batteries. What they envision and hope to purchase for about $1 million is something like the power walls from Tesla, a huge bank of three or more double stacks of batteries that can be charged during off-peak hours and used in peak hours to lessen the town’s cost.
Terrell said they would either buy the walls outright or go with a turnkey package. “We’re waiting on litigation with Duke to see if we can do it.” The litigation is being handled by ElectriCities.
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