All of the key players are on board for reducing the trash Boulder City buries in its landfill. The City Council, city staff, Southern Nevada Health District and the landfill operators support the idea. But recruiting a garbage-recycling plant to do just that depends entirely on who would pay for it.

The city says it can't fit any experimental projects into its budget. Picking up the cost of a pilot plant isn't the responsibility of Southern Nevada Health District or Boulder Disposal, the company that collects and buries the town's waste.

So the City Council Nov. 12 will consider drafting a request for proposal to ask entrepreneurs to build a plant and bring a bankroll.

"The city shouldn't be spending its own money to do research and development," Councilman Travis Chandler, who introduced the measure, said at the Oct. 14 council meeting. "Nevertheless, whoever does it should tell us where to get the money with a letter of intent."

At the council meeting, two men from Victorville, Calif., told the city they would submit a plan for reclaiming oil from trash, and they would pay for it.

That's something the council has heard before. Mike Little, the man who brought the idea to Boulder City, earlier this year told council members he had secured enough funding to bring a machine to eat local trash, but a few months later said he wouldn't work for free, suggesting the city could bring him on as a consultant.

On Oct. 15, Chandler, Councilwoman Linda Strickland, City Manager Vicki Mayes, Director of Public Works Scott Hansen, Boulder Disposal General Manager Robert Martello and Health District Environmental Health Engineer Walter Ross visited an experimental trash-crushing autoclave at the Crazy Horse Canyon Landfill in Salinas, Calif.

Neither Ross nor Martello returned repeated phone calls and e-mails about the trip.

The governmental agency that manages trash in Salinas and the surrounding areas bought machine, built in Reno by Comprehensive Resources, Recovery and Reuse Inc., for $100,000, a representative said.

The autoclave, one of two in the country, conveys municipal solid waste from the garbage truck into a cement mixer-like basin, where it is heated and mixed with steam and water and turned it into a mulch-like substance.

Screens sort the broken-down waste from the recycling and the other leftovers— the stuff that isn't glass and aluminum, but doesn't get broken down, that goes into the ground in the end.

From Salinas, the mulch goes to a U.S. Department of Agriculture facility that is studying the best way to make energy out of it — either microbial digestion for methane manufacturing or converting the organic pulp into ethanol.

The landfill operators have run about 15 tests with the machine since May and performed one for the Boulder City group during its visit.

Crazy Horse Canyon, a 74-acre landfill that last year took in 163,600 tons of municipal solid waste, is set to close in May 2009 because it will be full. The autoclaving experiment aims to find a way to put less trash into the ground, to prevent more landfill closures in the area.

The Boulder City landfill takes in about 80 tons of trash a day, and Mayes said the city should have a solid estimate this month of the waste stream specifics, something it needs before asking for plans on the trash reprocessing.

After the visit, Hansen said he was impressed with the technology, which he predicts will catch on in the future. Currently, money is a setback, he said.

"Boulder City has a small landfill operation compared to other locations, so I am sure it would be difficult to get a good return on investing in a full scale project," he said in an e-mail. "If we could build and operate a waste-to-energy plant without raising rates to our residents, we would jump on it."

Cassie Tomlin can be reached at 948-2073 or cassie.tomlin@hbcpub.com.

source: the gorgeous one

Hawthorn Suites Golf Resorts expects to redefine its site plan next month for its proposed hotel on the Boulder Creek Golf Club.

The hotel has asked to move its proposed location across Veterans Memorial Drive from the current clubhouse. That request to the City Council has been the second major roadblock in starting construction, President Morgan Burkett said Oct. 22.

After the City Council approved the lease in June 2007, it requested an attorney general's opinion about legality of the lease with the city. The opinion, which came in January, affirmed the contract.

After the site plans are finalized, the company will reset the project schedule, Burkett said, but he wouldn't estimate when construction would start.

Hawthorn Suites and Burkett's other venture, Legacy Hospitality, have 14 active projects.

He said none of his efforts have been delayed "as a result of the calamity in the financial markets," though he remains cautious.

"Certainly we're faced with challenges like everybody else, and we're all kind of holding our breath, but so far all of our projects are still on track."

The 50-year lease with the hotel, which would be built at the municipal Boulder Creek Golf Course, would reportedly earn the city $173,000 annually. The money would be designated to help pay for the fledgling course.

Cassie Tomlin can be reached at 948-2073 or cassie.tomlin@hbcpub.com.

source: the gorgeous one

With just days to go before the election, the fate of a tax to support Boulder City Hospital is now in the hands of the city's voters.

The arguments for and against have been made, and hospital officials say they are not planning any special push in the final hours before Tuesday to try to convince voters. They canceled the final town hall meeting that had been scheduled for last Thursday, saying the previous two forums had just turned into an opportunity for opponents to make their arguments on BCTV.

In fact, the campaign all along has been low-key, and even the staunchest supporters of the tax for the last several weeks have said that the tax initiative is in trouble.

The hospital's chief executive officer, Tom Maher, first waved the white flag a month ago, saying the initiative, which would raise about $750,000 a year to help the facility meet its operating expenses, seemed destined to fail.

And just last week, Boulder City Hospital Director of Development Craig Bailey didn't offer a much more encouraging prognosis.

"We're hopeful that it will be successful but, being realistic, we're planning that it won't be," he said.

The ballot question, which would authorize a tax of 15 cents per $100 assessed home value, faltered from the start.

Hospital officials calculated it would raise $1.08 million a year and allow the hospital to undertake an ambitious plan to expand and renovate, steps backers said were vital to the hospital's long-term viability.

But even before the first town forum to sell the tax was held, the hospital's top brass had to admit an embarrassing mistake: They had failed to take into account property tax caps and overestimated how much the tax would generate by $330,000.

Instead of a way to improve and expand, the initiative was suddenly being pitched as a necessity to keep the hospital doors open past 2012.

"We're treating this as the 11th hour, Maher said in July, after the error was discovered. "The emphasis has become more and more about keeping the hospital open. It's less and less about improving the facility."

Now a crisis in the financial sector has the public worried, and municipalities around the state are cutting their budgets because of lower-than-expected tax revenue.

That has changed the outlook for the hospital, Bailey said.

"We know people are thinking more with their wallets than they usually do with economic times as they are," he said.

In interviews with residents, the Boulder City News found support for the city having its own hospital, especially given the city's large senior population and the number of recreational visitors. But many people disliked the notion of a property tax to retain emergency services. The Boulder City News is a sister publication of the Las Vegas Sun.

W.J. Perlmutter, 57, counted himself a staunch proponent of both the hospital and the levy.

"Times are tough, the economy's bad and another tax is not wanted," he said. "But this is a good tax. This is not a luxury tax."

He likened the hospital levy to one for schools.

"The hospital is an essential service," Perlmutter said. "The alternative would be to have the hospital close."

Tina Coleman, 30, who was undecided on the issue, said she usually does not use Boulder City Hospital, because the co-pays were higher than when she traveled to Las Vegas or Henderson for medical care.

"It's easier for me to go into town," she said. "Anything I need the hospital for, I go to St. Rose."

However, she added, people probably need the hospital to remain in Boulder City for emergencies.

In the event the levy does not pass, officials are preparing for another attempt in 2010.

Dave Clark can be reached at 990-2677 or dave.clark@hbcpub.com.

source: lasvegassun.com

The female mountain lion had a bloody nose, but her hide bore no other signs of trauma. York, a biologist at Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, found the big cat lying motionless near the canyon's South Rim. He was determined to learn why she died.

Epidemic experts can only speculate about what happened next. When York cut into the lion, he must have released a cloud of bacteria and breathed in. On Nov. 2, York was found dead, a 21st-century victim of plague, the disease that in the Middle Ages turned Europe into a vast mortuary. He was 37.

"What will be the next emerging disease? The one we least expect," says David Morens of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Word of York's death flew among those who worked at the famed natural attraction, which draws 5 million visitors a year. For public health experts, it provoked concerns that plague might make a comeback. Experts from the National Park Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Arizona Department of Health converged on the park.

Fortunately, their investigation found only 49 people who had come in contact with York. All were treated with antibiotics. None became ill, says David Wong, a National Park Service epidemiologist.

"We identified his contacts even before the autopsy results were in," Wong says. "Within minutes, we were calling folks to tell them to come in. We opened the clinic on a Sunday."

The investigators who combed occupied areas of the park also were relieved to find no evidence of the rodent die-offs that prompt plague-infected fleas to leap to people and feast on them instead of the animals, Wong says. Massive flea migrations, prompted by widespread rodent deaths, caused Black Death in Europe during the Middle Ages.

Both York and the mountain lion had pneumonic plague, a lung infection that spreads through a cough or a sneeze.

"Pneumonic plague is a highly fatal disease," Wong says. "The death rate can be as high as 50% even with treatment."

Concerned about big cats

York was widely known for trapping and collaring big cats to study their movements and protect them from encroaching humans, says Charles Higgens, director of public health for the National Park Service.

York's friends say he could make a mountain lion trap with toothpicks, says Launie York, the biologist's mother. She says her son loved the woods around the family farm and was forever storing specimens in the family freezer.

"We had a saying here: 'If it's in a black plastic bag, don't open it. It isn't dinner,' " she says.

Before his fatal encounter with the mountain lion, York got to know the big cat well. During his two years at the park, York tracked, trapped and collared her. When she gave birth to three kittens, he ear-tagged them so that he could identify them when they were old enough for their own telemetry collars.

Then, on Oct. 25, the lion's collar sent out a mortality signal, indicating that she hadn't moved in 24 hours. When York located her carcass, her kittens were nowhere to be found. His notes suggest that he believed she may have been killed in a fight with a male, because of blood pooled around her nose. But York wasn't satisfied with guesswork, so he decided to do an autopsy at his home.

Ambushed by germs

Although plague is endemic west of the Mississippi — brought here in the 1800s by flea-infested rats on ships ferrying Chinese railroad workers to the USA — York had little reason to suspect it. Mountain lions usually stalk bigger game than rodents. But this lion had kittens that had to learn to hunt.

When York became ill, he visited the park's clinic, Wong says. On Oct. 30, clinic staff diagnosed a flu-like illness and sent him home. It was there, three days later, that a roommate found him lying motionless on the couch.

Wong says York's toughness and self-sufficiency may have cost him his life. "He was a tough guy. He gutted out more than you or I or almost anyone else would."

He says the case has prompted the National Park Service to begin working with colleagues at the CDC and at state and local health departments to identify diseases within the park system that might pose a risk to the 276 million people who visit every year, as well as the many people who might be exposed once park visitors return home.