By Juliana A. Torres
For the News-Gazette

The St. Cloud City Council agreed June 17 to begin official negotiations with the Orlando Utilities Commission, allowing it to generate power from the methane gas coming from the city’s old landfill near Peghorn Park.

City staff has been in discussions with the utility company for some time in attempts to work out a deal, Public Services Administrator Todd Swingle said. Currently, OUC estimates that it will have a $400,000 net loss after constructing about $4 million worth of infrastructure needed to generate power from the landfill gas, but argues that it is moving forward with the project for green energy educational purposes and to help build a good relationship with the city.

Recently, staff was able to get the utility to agree with three sticking points for the city: a 30 percent share in any profits the utility might generate from power production, an agreement to keep the infrastructure pipes buried underground and the potential to eventually use the land above the landfill after the harmful methane gases are recovered.

“We don’t have a lot of unknowns with OUC,” City Manager Tom Hurt said, adding that the utility’s board of directors has already approved the project.

The city, as early as 2008, began looking into the possibility of using the methane gas, when a city report indicated that the costs would outweigh the gains. Recent tax incentives and a general shift toward green energy alternatives changed that perspective as well as OUC’s interest in the landfill, Swingle said. OUC consultants were at the landfill in March last year estimating how much power could be generated from the gas.

A company official at the new St. Cloud incubator then spoke with staff about several ideas he had on how to use the gas from the landfill, which is close to where the incubator building itself was recently constructed. Swingle said staff at that point felt obligated to inform the council on potential alternatives to OUC’s plans.

“Why wouldn’t we support a company coming out of that incubator? It doesn’t make any sense,” Councilwoman Mickey Hopper said.

If the council decides to look for a private company, it would have to advertise a request for proposal, which would not guarantee the incubator company would be awarded the project. Also, OUC indicated that it wouldn’t be interested in the project if it had to go through a request for proposal process, given the extra months it would take city staff to receive and compare proposals, Swingle said.

Councilman Jay Polachek, the council’s representative to the utility, said he asked why timing was so critical at a meeting with OUC representatives.

“The answer I got was, they estimate we only got eight to nine years left of gas coming out of our landfill. And that is at the very short end of anything that they would ever consider doing,” he said. “That’s why timing is so critical for them. The longer they wait, the less time that the landfill is viable to pull gas from.”

OUC estimates that the landfill in St. Cloud would generate about 1 megawatt of power, which would be the smallest generation plant it would own, Polachek said.

“It’s one they wouldn’t normally consider doing, but given their relationship with St. Cloud, they wanted to do so,” he said. “One megawatt is not a lot of juice. I guess if you take it at face value, it is out of good faith, and it is building that relationship and I’d like to think that is the sole reason for doing it.  Hopefully, they do get 15, heck, 20 years out of it. That would be great. We could all make some money.”

Eventually, the majority of council agreed that allowing OUC to begin energy production quickly would bring the most benefits to the city. Councilman Jarom Fertic asked staff to try to negotiate for the city to use some of the power generated from the landfill to power its ball fields.

An agreement between the city and the utility will have to come back before the council for official approval.

No change to the chicken ordinance

The majority of the council also decided Thursday not to allow chickens within city limits, as is currently established through city ordinance.

A family on Lakeshore Boulevard has kept as many as four chickens, including one rooster, as pets over the last 14 months. A neighbor had reported the chickens to code enforcement, prompting the family to ask the city to amend the ban against farm fowl in all areas outside of the city’s agricultural zones.

The council recently did amend city ordinances to allow Vietnamese potbellied pigs to be kept as pets within the city. However, after much discussion, the council decided to make no change to the current ordinances.

Some thought was given to creating an exemption for student educational projects like 4-H. However, the council decided that the $900 cost of applying for a conditional use permit, which is used to notify the student’s neighbors and hold a public hearing about the potential farm animals, was too much of a burden, not only for a student, but too much for the city to exempt.

Hopper argued that the council’s previous decision to allow the potbellied pigs “opened the floodgates” to all the other requests and allowing chickens would only make that worse.

“It’s not just his chickens that we’’re going to end up allowing, it’s all these other animals,” she said.

Fertic said later that Thursday’s workshop still didn’t address the issue of the city annexing agricultural land from the unincorporated area and forcing residents there to change how and what types of animals they kept. Pigs, other than the potbellied kind, are banned from the city entirely.