Compost or Green energy plants?

A large scale composting facility in CA

Hi, I’d like to start dumping stinky bio-waste next door to you. I’m the guy who mistakenly demolishes landmark buildings on city contracts. I’ve donated lots of money to elect dunderheads to lead your city into the ground- which has been very good for my demolition business. I charge a lot more to tear down buildings because I get the big contracts from the people I donated to. Won’t you welcome my third world solution to bio-waste to your community?

Steve Rauch, who owns the Dayton Farmersville Road property and an excavation and demolition business called SRI Inc., 1550 Soldiers Home-West Carrollton Road, and business partner Dan Wampler of Mason submitted a conditional use request to the Jefferson Township trustees for the composting facility and two greenhouses.

If approved, the proposed business would be called KOTE (Keepers of the Earth) Organic Farms and take in waste, including fruit and vegetable cut-outs and tea leaves from food processing companies, according to Wampler.

The compost created at the proposed facility would be sold.

via Proposed compost facility topic of NAACP meeting | www.mydaytondailynews.com.

A community meeting with the NAACP chapter is scheduled for Monday June 30 at 6 p.m. at Jefferson High School, 2701 S. Union Road to discuss this plan.

photo of Quasar bio digestor facility

Quasar bio digester facility

On the other hand- meet a guy named Mel Kurtz. He’s a visionary from the Cleveland area who has perfected a process to take bio-waste and put it in big sealed vessels and turn it into green bio fuel. My plants don’t stink- and I can create natural gas cheaper than fracking can- without creating toxic waste water, causing earthquakes or having your property downwind of a shit heap of flies and maggots

What is anaerobic digestion? Anaerobic digestion is a process in which microorganisms break down organic material in the absence of oxygen, creating biogas, which can be captured to use for electricity, pipeline quality natural gas, and motor vehicle fuel. Most of the natural gas used to heat and power homes and businesses in the U.S. comes from underground deposits created millions of years ago by the anaerobic digestion of ancient organic materials. Quasar’s anaerobic digestion system generates a renewable form of natural gas in a matter of days by feeding microorganisms organic waste including: crop residuals, manure, food waste, fats, oils and greases, personal care products, biobased lubricants and municipal waste water.

via quasar energy group.

Mel Kurtz is becoming a very wealthy man with his green technology. And while he can build plants from scratch, he’s tried to put his systems into our area- using old fuel farms for failed “economic developments” – by partnering with a local visionary businessman, but, because either he forgot to grease a bunch of political palms- or, well, he forgot to grease a bunch of political palms, his offers of CNG for $2 a gallon for 20 years, and offering to create clean electricity to power major airport infrastructures have been rebuffed or ignored.

The first fools to pass this up were the Dayton City Commission and Dayton City Manager Tim Riordan. The Emery/UPS facility at the Dayton “International” Airport was tied up in a lease with UPS until 2019, guaranteeing the city a few million a year, a facility maintained to FAA standards, and employment of about 50 people to maintain it.

A local visionary took a plan to the former airport director and UPS to put solar arrays on the roof of the facility, turn the fuel farm that was sitting unused into anaerobic biodigesters, and fill the facility with equipment for disaster relief using RFID tagged supplies and UAVs to fly over a relief site- tracking all the supplies. Cutting edge stuff- instead, they let UPS opt out of the lease for net present value of about $7 million- and handed half of it- and the $100 million + facility that your tax dollars helped build and equip, over to the vultures of IRG, who quickly let the facility go to hell, scrapped the fuel farm, the 4 huge emergency power turbine generators, the computerized conveyor systems  and leased a small portion out to some low tech business with 35 jobs.

That local visionary then turned his sights on Wilmington Airpark. Another flop of “economic development” where taxpayers gave millions to Airborne Express to make an air freight hub, only to be acquired by DHL- and then abandoned. There, a similar fuel farm was waiting for biodigestors- but a former Dayton “economic development expert” who failed his way up to the Ohio Department of Development under Governor Strickland- and then found his way to the Port Authority of Wilmington, has sat and collected a $150K a year paycheck to scrap parts of that airpark just to keep the lights on. In an email that was accidentally cc’d he said flat out that there is no way he’d ever do business with that local visionary.

Problem is- Mel Kurtz, who offered to walk in to Wilmington and invest about $30 million asking nothing other than to sell electricity back at about half the going rate from DP&L/AEG, likes that local visionary. Now Mr. Kurtz, though the local visionary, is moving on to try to work with the people at Montgomery County to set up his systems at both the South Transfer Station and the proposed new Montgomery County Fairgrounds in Brookville. County officials are traveling to Columbus to view one of his systems there. Interesting thing- other than a 20-year land lease and a contract to supply energy at a discount for 20 years- Kurtz isn’t asking for any taxpayer handouts.

I’m not going to tell Derrick Foward and the Dayton Unit of the NAACP what to say at the meeting with the shit pile king of Dayton, but, building compost facilities today is akin to trying to sell mercury filings for teeth, cigarettes as a way to help asthma or thinking that “separate but equal” is a valid solution to civil rights.

It’s time for the people of West Dayton to say enough to being used as a dump for other people’s problems. It’s also time that the people wake up and realize that there are some pretty smart people in our community trying to work their magic, except for the fools we’ve elected over and over with the money supplied by those who have their own interests in mind.

 

 

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