Mayor Jimmy Cockroft told the Board of Aldermen Monday night that Prairie Farms on Veterans Memorial Drive is currently trucking its waste offsite in response to the city’s continued request that the company take steps to resolve an ongoing odor problem at the city sewage lagoon that receives wastewater from the facility.“They are now hauling away their waste,” Cockroft said.The mayor added that the company’s permit, which expires next year.“We talked about their permit coming up next year and putting some limits on it,” Cockroft said, adding that he was told, “If we put too many, it might jeopardize the operations out there.”While there have always been occasional odor problems nearby during weather changes, the the “obnoxious odor” extending further out for more prolonged periods of time started in the spring of 2018, Cockroft said in past discussions of the matter. The “obnoxious odor,” the mayor said at the time, is caused by waste stream contents in the lagoon that have a high BOD — biological oxygen demand. They are contents that reduce the oxygen levels in the lagoon, causing the odor.“Milk is high BOD, and of the 250,000 gallons that go into the lagoon daily, about half or a little better is from Prairie Farms,” Cockroft said in an earlier interview with The Star-Herald. It was in 2018 that the city purchased about $250,000 worth of new aerators for the lagoon and changed chemical treatments at the site in the hope of eradicating the odor problem.Despite those efforts, however, city officials say the situation had not improved.At Cockroft’s request, the aldermen unanimously agreed to send a letter to company officials all but demanding representatives appear at the board’s Feb. 16 meeting to explain what the company intends to do to stem the stench. But with last week’s winter storm, that appearance was cancelled.Instead, the mayor said, Prairie Farms’ corporate Operations Manager Troy Ferguson participated in a video call with Cockroft and Howard Sharkey of the city’s wastewater department to discuss the issue. In the end, the mayor said there was agreement for Ferguson and the company’s local Waste Operator Rodney Smith, to work closely with the city.“We have agreed to work together to get this fixed once and for all,” he said.
