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Scott County votes to send comments, urges MPCA to clarify and rewrite draft resource management report
Summary
Brad Davis and county staff urged the board to send a comment letter asking the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to rewrite parts of its draft resource management report, flagging concerns about waste-to-energy classification and a 90% diversion scenario; the board voted to authorize submission of comments.
County staff told commissioners the draft MPCA resource management report, produced under a 2023 legislative directive, contains approaches and scenarios the county believes could be misread as precursors to regulation and that the county should make its views part of the public record.
"Is this really just informative study or is this the precursor to some regulation?" Brad Davis, the county27s director of physical development, said the board should keep watch and comment now to avoid having report language later used to support rules or funding criteria.
Staff highlighted three central concerns: (1) the draft report appears to treat waste-to-energy as equivalent to landfilling, which staff said would devalue waste-to-energy in the county27s view; (2) the report includes a highly ambitious 90% diversion scenario used for analysis, which staff said should be explicitly labeled analytical and non-binding; and (3) the report is not sufficiently transparent about costs for some recommended infrastructure and policy options.
Commissioners discussed the risk that legislative or permitting decisions could later cite the draft report. One commissioner said the county27s draft comment letter recommends the MPCA rewrite parts of the report (staff used the word "rewrite" in describing the county position) to better reflect the statutory waste-management hierarchy and to make clear that scenarios are analytic, not mandatory.
A motion to adopt a resolution authorizing submittal of comments on the MPCA draft resource management report passed unanimously. Brad Davis said staff would also submit a separate technical letter to address map and table corrections and provide additional details to the Metropolitan Council and MPCA.
County discussion also included numerical cost notes read from the report packet during the meeting: a speaker quoted a total capital cost of $980,000,000,000 and an annual cost of $315,000,000,000 as set out in the report (these figures were read aloud from the packet by a commissioner). The county27s comment letter asks for clearer cost transparency and a revised tone in the final document.
