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Clearwater considers offering boaters sewage-pumping service
By LESTER R. DAILEY
Article published on Thursday, April 6, 2006 |
CLEARWATER – The $41,000 vessel the city is planning to buy isn’t the Love Boat. In fact, it’s a boat that’s hard to love.
That’s because the 18-footer’s sole purpose is to pump the sewage out of other boats.
Bill Morris, the city’s marine and aviation director, asked the City Council’s permission on April 3 to purchase the vessel through a Clean Vessel Act grant agreement with the state Department of Environmental Protection, under which the state will pick up $30,750 of the cost, and the city will pay the remaining $10,250 from unused funds allocated to a dock construction project.
“This gets us the pump-out vessel on the existing state grant while the grant is still available,” Morris told the council members. “We want to jump on it.”
The basic boat, made by PumpOut USA, will cost $35,000. Equipment installation, signs, brochures and educational materials account for the other $6,000.
“The city would like to use the boat to supplement the pump-out station at the city fuel dock,” Morris said in a memo to the council.
When full, the boat would discharge its effluent directly into the city’s wastewater system.
Morris said that the boat will be staffed by current city employees, so the only additional cost would be $1,000 to $1,500 a year for fuel and maintenance.
In addition to pumping out vessels in the city marina, the boat could pump out private vessels at other locations and pay for itself, Morris said. When asked, Morris estimated that it wouldn’t pump out more than a couple of hundred vessels the first year.
“It’s a matter of building up a reputation and customer demand,” he said.
Morris said that the city would charge a “nominal fee” of $5 to $15 a pump-out. That upset Mayor Frank Hibbard, who asked how much private contractors charge for the same service.
“I haven’t seen any prices on private enterprises,” Morris replied. “But I have seen advertisements indicating that they do exist.”
Hibbard said that he doesn’t think it would be fair for the city to use a subsidized vessel to undercut the prices of private contractors. He added that the city should match the price of the contractors and let the boaters decide who gives the best service.
But he promised to put the item on Thursday night’s consent agenda, virtually guaranteeing its passage, if Morris will let him know before then what private pumping services charge.
Another item on Thursday’s agenda would require large buildings to install a Radio Signal Booster System that would allow police and firefighters’ portable radios and speaker microphones to achieve a 95-percent reliability rate at shoulder height inside. The city operates an 11-channel public safety radio system in the 800 MHz band.
Emergency service officials tried to pass a similar ordinance four years ago, but were unsuccessful. Since then, they have worked with the Pinellas County Licensing Board and the construction industry and are optimistic that it will pass this time.
High-rises and large structures such as building supply warehouse stores are the primary target of the proposed ordinance. Single-family homes, townhouses, apartment buildings and condos fewer than five stories high and buildings less than 250 feet wide or deep are exempt. The ordinance would apply to new construction and renovations that cost 50 percent or more of the value of the existing structure.
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Article published on Thursday, April 6, 2006
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