Grumble, grumble, grumble… Just about everybody who lives or works in Oak Ridge knows about the growing problem of traffic congestion at the Solway bridge and Solway around 5 to 6 pm weekdays. This could be resolved, of course, if more of the people who work in Oak Ridge also lived in Oak Ridge. The Oak Ridge Chamber of Commerce seems to be making some inroads on that front with its “Live Where Your Work” effort, but packing up and moving isn’t a practical option for everybody who’s here now. Instead, many people who work at ORNL have been going home “the back way” by taking Hwy 95 to the I-40 interchange near Lenoir City. That route is getting clogged, too… Late in the day Thursday when I drove “the back way” from ORNL to downtown Knoxville for a session of the MTAS “Elected Officials Academy”, it took me a full 10 minutes to go the first mile on Bethel Valley Road (from the ORNL west entrance to Hwy 95) — traffic was backed up a long way from the intersection, waiting to turn left. This was the third weekly class, and the situation has gotten worse each week — probably due to more and more people avoiding Solway each week. The delay was still less than I’ve sometimes experienced around Solway at that time of day, but still…
I keep looking for billboards saying “If you lived in Oak Ridge, you’d be home by now,” but the Oak Ridge residential developers who advertise in Solway have been more subtle than that. I don’t much like the idea of making it easier for people who work in Oak Ridge to live elsewhere, but this congestion is making a lot of people eager for some sort of transit on the Pellissippi Parkway corridor — one of the things that Gary Gilmartin and the Oak Ridge Energy Corridor partnership are discussing. I just hope that the initiative also ends up benefiting people who live in Oak Ridge…
Following up to my earlier post on chickens… Today’s Oak Ridger reports that the 5 Planning Commission members who attended last week’s work session were negative about the idea of allowing chickens in residential neighborhoods. I wasn’t able to attend the meeting and I haven’t yet seen what staff presented to them. However, I do know that there was no advance publicity of the meeting’s topic (unless you count this blog) so there may have been no interested citizens at the meeting, and it’s apparent from the article that staff presented the idea in negative terms (saying it was supported by only a “handful of people” and raising concerns about the workload for enforcement and licensing and permitting).
If chickens are going to come to Oak Ridge to roost or lay eggs, people with interest and knowledge of chicken-rearing are going to have to sit down for a two-way discussion with the planning commissioners and staff. The newspaper says the topic will be addressed by the full Planning Commission at its February 25th meeting (5:30 pm in the City courtroom); based on what I know of the subject and what I read in the newspaper reports, I think it’s premature for the Commission to take any final action on this.
Follow-up (written on Wednesday): Community Development staff provided me with a copy of the written material provided to the committee; it included copies of the text of a couple of e-mails I had received from citizens. Staff say that there were several interested citizens at the meeting. It appears that discussion at the meeting dealt mainly with broad concepts.
I’m tickled about the news that the big cuts in DOE’s 2011 Environmental Management (i.e., environmental cleanup) budget for Oak Ridge that were rumored to be in the proposed budget have been averted. Frank Munger’s blog tells about Representative Lincoln Davis’ role in restoring funds to the yet-to-be-announced budget. Three cheers for Lincoln Davis!
Cleanup budgets have been lean in recent years (less than necessary t0 meet previously negotiated regulatory commitments). Cutting the funding even further would not only have caused a lot of job losses, but would have required East Tennessee to live even longer with the negative legacies of the Manhattan Project and Cold War.
I hope that the funding restoration remains intact as the proposed budget moves through Congress…
E-mail from State Representative Jim Hackworth’s office urged me to read the proposals that Governor Bredesen presented to the General Assembly yesterday (here’s the press release) and give him my views. Education is not one of the topics I typically contact my legislators about, but the governor’s proposal to transform the state’s education system has gotten my attention, so I wrote to Rep. Hackworth about a couple aspects of the proposal:
The state’s education system is embarrassingly poor — and it’s in everyone’s interest to improve it. (Not only does it limit the next generation’s horizons as individuals, but it hurts the whole state economically.)
Tennessee’s kids aren’t stupid, but too many of them are not learning effectively. I think that a large part of the problem is that our citizens as a whole do not place high enough value on education. A new government program can’t overcome that attitude problem “overnight” (or even in 5 years). However, measures to reward teachers for their effectiveness in helping kids learn (regardless of where the kids are educationally when they arrive in the classroom) seem promising as a way to increase the effectiveness of our education system. Go for it!
Additionally, I share the governor’s view that our state colleges and universities are letting bureaucratic jealousies get in the way of educating our young adults effectively. If his plan forces them to coordinate and collaborate, it’s worth a try.
People will get hung up on many of the details of implementing these transformational initiatives (and there’s good reason to get hung up on some of those details), but it makes sense to commit to these major policy changes quickly (to qualify for the federal incentive) and hassle the details later.
Good news from Kristin Olsen of the Humane Society of Anderson County:
Due to the overwhelming response and concern for continuing our neuter/spay program, we have met and revamped our program to help those in need.
We will continue to offer financial assistance to Anderson County residents. Requests will be made in person on the last Saturday of the month at the Humane Society Flea Market located at 372 Warehouse Road in Oak Ridge. A $10 donation will be requested. Twenty approvals will be issued each month.
We still need the support of the Anderson County Commission that helps our program each year, donations and memberships. We are also open to sponsorships from companies or individuals.
We also have our pet pantry to help families feed their pets, doghouses to help those out in inclement weather and still go into schools to teach students about being kind to their pet and the responsibilities of having a pet.
If you have any questions or would like to donate or know someone that we can help in our community, please call 381-1550.
The Humane Society Serving all of Anderson County
Congratulations to Kristin on this good result — less than 2 weeks after the news that the spay-neuter program would be suspended.
Two bits of good news in a row: (1) The Oak Ridge Revitalization Effort now owns the Alexander Inn and (2) an additional trail segment has opened on the Black Oak Ridge Conservation Easement in westernmost Oak Ridge. Hurray for the people whose volunteer efforts are making good things happen!
On the Alexander Inn, Kate Groover says:
It’s official. The Oak Ridge Revitalization Effort now owns the Alexander Inn/Guest House.
Plans are underway to begin cleaning up the grounds as quickly as possible. The Rogers Group is generously providing 250 tons of gravel to fill the stagnant swimming pool immediately and Robert McNabb is providing the trucks and labor.
We encourage all those interested in this property to join us in City Court on Monday, December 21 at 8:00 AM to show your support during the hearing scheduled to address current code violations.
On the Black Oak Ridge Conservation Easement, Tom Dunigan says:
For your holiday enjoyment, an additional 0.8 miles of trail have been opened in the NE corner of the Black Oak Ridge Conservation Easement. See updated trail map and Google maps at this page on Tom’s website. The new trail includes the boundary gravel road section (0.3 miles) that descends toward Blair Road, connected back to the entrance gravel by 0.5 miles of single-track (Twisted Beech Trail). Trail work and design were guided by TWRA’s Jim Evans and Larry Creech with help from numerous volunteers.
Black Oak Ridge Conservation Easement includes 3,073 acres on Black Oak Ridge and McKinney Ridge in the western part of Oak Ridge. The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency and DOE manage the site. It contains interesting community types and species such as hemlock-rhododendron forest, beech maple forest, cedar barrens, fringe tree, spider lily, spreading false-foxglove, white-topped sedge, Vaseys trillium, Tennessee dace and southeastern shrew. Some of these species are unusual for the Ridge and Valley region. The area currently has more than eleven miles of trails, mostly on gravel roads, which are considered moderately difficult. The trails are open daily from daylight to dusk, and are limited to hikers and bicyclists. No motorized vehicles or animals are permitted, with the exception of motorized wheelchairs and service animals.
Wow… Frank Munger’s blog post “Who’s making the big bucks in Oak Ridge?” is attracting a lot of attention today among staff at ORNL. I have a hunch that the information that the top managers of certain local government contractors are receiving annual compensation on the order of half a million dollars or more is going to be affecting public discussion in Oak Ridge for some time to come…
“Solar 101”: Solar Basics for the Oak Ridge Homeowner will be held Saturday, November 14th, 2009, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm, in the Oak Ridge Public Library Auditorium. Sponsored by the Oak Ridge Environmental Quality Advisory Board and the City of Knoxville’s Solar America Cities Program, this workshop will provide an overview of the solar technologies that are available for home installation such as solar photovoltaics, solar hot water, solar lighting, solar heating, and passive solar design. It will also provide an introduction to the step-by-step process of “going solar” in your home.
The workshop will review basic incentives and financing options, as well as best practices for hiring qualified installers. Although the workshop is not designed to offer technical or financial guidance to a specific project, it should help homeowners better understand the options and process for pursuing solar technologies.
For more information, contact: Athanasia Senecal (865) 425- 3574 or Erin Burns at (865) 215-2065
It turns out that DOE’s conference call (see previous post) was not really an “initial public outreach activity” (other than the fact that it was their first public outreach on this topic), but rather was a belated damage-control job: the Department wanted to see whether it would be a bad idea to follow through with a contract they had already signed.
According to an article in Weapons Complex Monitor, the day after the conference call, DOE canceled a contract with Toxco Inc. Toxco has filed a lawsuit seeking reinstatement of this contract, which DOE entered into earlier this year, under which Toxco’s Oak Ridge unit was going to do clean-up work at a DOE site in upstate New York, including disposing of some contaminated soil in a Tennessee municipal landfill. Use of a Tennessee municipal landfill instead of a licensed low-level radioactive waste facility was going to save DOE $750 thousand. The reported value of the contract with Toxco was more than $1.1 million, so I’m guessing that the total cost of the project with another company that would send all of the waste to a radwaste site is almost $1.9 million. This represented huge savings for DOE, and Weapons Complex Monitor says that in July DOE officials had signed off on the plan to put the waste in a Tennessee landfill.
With this background, I still congratulate DOE for having the good sense to drop the idea, but hearing the rest of the story gives me a lot of concern. The Tennessee Department of Environment & Conservation (TDEC) policy that allows low concentrations of radioactive contamination in some state municipal landfills is well-intentioned but ill-advised. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea technically — radioactivity is naturally present in the environment, and this is material (”contaminated” because radioactivity has been added to it) that may be no more radioactive (or even less radioactive) than some natural soil. Also, TDEC requires a risk assessment of each waste stream that is allowed to go to a landfill under its “bulk survey for release” rules.
The problem is that federal law does not allow for “de minimis” radioactive waste to be managed except in rad-licensed facilities (the Nuclear Regulatory Commission tried to change it more than 2 decades ago, but dropped the idea after they ran into severe political opposition), and no other state permits this (as far as I know). As a result, it appears that Tennessee is the destination of choice for some rad waste — this is cheap and easy place to dispose of lightly contaminated material. Some local businesses are profiting because they serve as middlemen in the transactions between waste generators and Tennessee landfills, but I don’t think that’s the kind of business model that this community wants to promote. Although it looks like Toxco’s contract included some other technical work on the site cleanup (and I’m sorry that they lost that work), in general I believe that the only economic benefit to Oak Ridge from these waste-to-landfill transactions is that they help a company’s balance sheet — there’s no local tax revenue, and this business probably damages the city’s reputation. Furthermore, I assume that Tennessee citizens who have tolerated landfills in their “backyards” do so because area citizens and businesses need to get rid of their garbage, not so that Tennessee can take waste from the rest of the country (and possibly the world).
If there is technical merit in allowing lightly contaminated radwaste into landfills, let’s change the disposal policy at the national level. One state should not be doing this unilaterally. There certainly would be economic benefits to changing that policy, but if DOE and industry can quietly send their waste to Tennessee, where’s their incentive to lobby for change at the national level?
I don’t know whether to castigate DOE for thinking of this in the first place, or congratulate them for having the good sense to drop the idea — I’m talking about the idea of sending radioactively contaminated soil from New York state to the Chestnut Ridge landfill in Anderson County, documented in Saturday’s News Sentinel. The good news is that they dropped the idea.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management had an invitation-only conference call on Thursday about the idea of sending 6,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil to the Chestnut Ridge Landfill under the State of Tennessee’s “Bulk Survey for Release” program, under which they allow material with light rad contamination into a few state municipal landfills. According to conference call participants, the idea was not viewed favorably by the citizen-group participants, and on Friday DOE sent out an e-mail indicating that they had ditched the idea. The e-mailed information said:
On October 8, 2009, the U.S. Department of Energy conducted a teleconference briefing as part of an initial public outreach activity regarding the disposition path for the soils being removed as part of the clean-up of the North Field of the Separations Process Research Unit Project (SPRU) located in New York. This conference call was held consistent with the principles of the Department’s Environmental Management American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (“Recovery Act”) Program to assure complete openness and transparency in all of its work scope.
As noted during the briefing, the Department considered a waste disposition path for SPRU soils that included an option to use a facility located in Tennessee. Prior to a final decision on the disposal path involving the Recovery Act work, the Department began the public process to engage stakeholder groups from the perspective of the receiving location. Participants from the various stakeholder groups provided feedback during the conference call. The Department committed to consider the public comments and to provide additional information. In fulfillment of that commitment, the Department has decided to dispose of these soils in a licensed low-level radioactive waste facility.
I’m glad they dropped this – it was a bad idea, but I think DOE deserves egg on its face for thinking it up in the first place. I suspect that the invitation-only conference call was an attempt to keep things quiet, but News Sentinel reporters got the story anyway. Trying to keep this quiet also looks like a bad idea on DOE’s part.
