PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The city of Portland is being sued over its plan to use up to $12 million from a surcharge on customers’ sewer bills to help pay to plan the Portland Harbor Superfund cleanup.

Oregon Public Broadcasting reports it’s the second lawsuit challenging the use of funds collected by the city’s sewer utility, the Bureau of Environmental Services, to pay for the city’s share of the Superfund work.

Attorney John DiLorenzo and his clients contend that despite rulings in a previous lawsuit, the city has continued to use restricted sewer money as a piggybank for projects that should be paid for by unrestricted tax dollars in the city’s general funds.

“They’re using the sewer fund as a bank,” DiLorenzo said.

City leaders and environmentalists say the sewer utility’s spending on the Portland Harbor project was clearly upheld by a judge in 2017 – and the new lawsuit is the latest in a series of tactics to delay the federally-mandated clean-up of the river.

“We’re operating squarely within the ruling that the court has already given,” said Commissioner Nick Fish, who oversees the Bureau of Environmental Services. “Since this lawsuit essentially raises the same issues, we believe it’s frivolous.”

The clean-up is expected to take up to 13 years and cost approximately $1 billion, and the city is one among many parties legally liable for the pollution.

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The city of Portland will spend $4 million to repair or replace 8,000 linear feet of failing sewer pipe in its Northwest section.

The Portland City Council on Wednesday authorized competitive bidding to furnish materials and labor for the Far North Nicolai Sewer Rehabilitation Project.

Murray and Associates along with the Bureau of Environmental Services prepared plans for the project, which is part of a to modernize sewer infrastructure. Construction is slated to start in the spring and last about 18 months. Funding will come from the Sewer System Operating Fund.

The project area falls roughly between Northwest Nicolai Street and Thurman Street and between Northwest 21st and 28th avenues. The densely populated neighborhood has a mix of residences and small businesses. Pipes in this part of Portland are too small to meet current demand, and buildings there have historically been susceptible to basement backups, BES spokesman Linc Mann said.

Most of the pipes targeted for replacement are around 80 years old. In many cases, 12-inch pipe will be replaced by 36-inch pipe.

Northwest Vaughn Street, between Nicolai and Thurman streets, is a heavily-traveled road off of Interstate 405. To minimize traffic impacts there, crews will work nights digging up intersections between Northwest 23rd and 27th avenues. Initially, more work was planned on Northwest Vaughn, but after a redesign – in response to public concern about adverse effects – the bulk of construction shifted three blocks north.

The job will include a combination of open-trench excavation and cured-in-place pipelining, a trenchless repair method that takes several days per section and requires crews to work around the clock. To perform work outside the 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. period mandated by city code, a noise ordinance variance was acquired.

About 40 businesses will be affected by the project, according to BES.

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The Portland Bureau of Environmental Services has hired an engineer to design a facility that will convert methane biogas produced by the city’s Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant into vehicle fuel.

The Portland City Council recently approved a contract with Omaha, Neb.-based architecture and engineering firm HDR, which has a Portland office, to design a biogas processing and storage facility and vehicle fueling station at the North Portland sewage treatment plant.

The estimated $10.5 million facility will allow the city to reuse nearly all of the biogas produced at the plant as a byproduct of solid waste treatment, said Vu Han, a BES engineer. Much of the 600 million cubic feet of biogas produced there annually either fuels steam boilers at plant buildings, helps produce on-site electricity or is sold to Malarkey Roofing Products to power part of its nearby manufacturing facility. About 20 percent of the plant’s biogas output is still burned away instead of being reused, Han said.

“We’re working on this project to find the most beneficial use for the remaining biogas,” he said.

BES staffers had originally considered expanding a co-generation plant that produces electricity with biogas, Han said. They eventually decided that the most economical option would be to build a facility that compresses the biogas into fuel for large trucks that are either rigged or manufactured to run on compressed natural gas. BES may use the fuel for city vehicles and sell it to a utility or Portland-area waste companies for fueling garbage trucks, he said.

Final design of the new facility is scheduled to finish this year, and city officials will likely seek bids for a general contractor early next year, Han said. Construction is scheduled to start in 2016 and wrap up by early 2017.

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An independent auditor hired to investigate budget overages during construction of an employee building at the Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant found no evidence of illegal practices, according to Portland Commissioner Nick Fish.

“In response to the auditor’s report about the new Bureau of Environmental Services employee building at the Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant, I committed to bring in an outside law firm to review the findings, conduct an investigation, and issue a written report on lessons learned and ‘best practices,’ ” Fish wrote in an email. “In its report, Barran Liebman LLP found no evidence that laws, rules or ethical guidelines were violated. However, the report raises a number of red flags about bureau practices and decisions.”

The Bureau of Environmental Services recently completed design and construction of an office building that was supposed to cost $3.2 million. Instead, ratepayers forked over $11.5 million to complete the building.

Portland City Auditor LaVonne Griffin-Valade conducted an audit of the project and released in October 2014, stating that cost increases were due to the bureau expanding the project’s scope, making “discretionary design choices” and failing to oversee the project during the design phase.

Fish’s office hired Barran Liebman‘s investigators to review the auditor’s report, investigate whether any laws, rules or guidelines were violated, and analyze project management decisions.

The firm’s report states: “We found no evidence that funds were misappropriated, misdirected or mishandled (with the sole exception of the pass-through payment to the designer discussed in more detail below). We also found no evidence that caused us to question the motivations of the BES staff. While there is considerable legitimate debate about BES decisions and judgment calls and whether the right choices were made, we saw evidence that the BES staff tried to make the best choices for the city and the ratepayers and we were impressed with their skill level. Our review, however, identified practices and decisions that contributed to the controversy and which we believe should be evaluated by the city in its ongoing discussions about best practices in managing capital projects of this magnitude.”

The “pass-through payment” mentioned in the report was a transaction during the design phase in which the project’s general contractor, Skanska, paid the project’s design firm, Skylab, and was reimbursed from the construction budget.

“We did not find any evidence to suggest that the design work was not performed and we did not find any evidence to suggest that the design work was unnecessary,” Barran Liebman investigators wrote in their report. “BES had, however, incurred the expense without authority. Specifically it had permitted design work to proceed when the design budget was exhausted and ultimately arranged for payment from the construction budget by means of a pass-through.”

Barran Liebman issued 11 recommendations the bureau should implement in order to prevent a situation like this from occurring again. Fish said he’s “already initiated a number of reforms that address many of the findings. They are designed to strengthen accountability and transparency.”

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The Portland Bureau of Environmental Services will soon seek a contractor for a planned stream restoration project in Southwest Portland.

In the next three weeks, bureau officials will likely start seeking bids for the South Ash Creek stream enhancement project, said Amin Wahab, BES Fanno-Tryon watershed manager.

The project, planned in collaboration with Portland Parks & Recreation, will involve stabilization of a stream channel that’s been prone to erosion in the Ash Creek Natural Area portion of Dickinson Park off of Southwest 55th Avenue, he said. This will include planting native plants and adding rocks and boulders to slow the velocity of the creek.

Project plans also call for repairing and protecting a nearby sewer line that has been periodically exposed by erosion, leaving the pipe vulnerable to damage that could cause raw sewage to spill into the creek, Wahab said. Stabilizing the stream bed should prevent this from happening, he said.

Another benefit of the project will be enhancing in-stream habitat, helping sustain fish populations in larger connected waterways, Wahab said.

“These (creek) reaches, they’re important for producing food for fish further downstream,” he said.

Construction is scheduled to start this summer; it’s expected to require three months to complete.

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There’s more to green roofs besides stormwater retention and energy savings, and Portland State University graduate student Sydney Gonsalves is looking into it.

She is researching the biodiversity of Portland green roofs to prove that they also provide viable urban habitat. Her efforts to collect, count and identify beetles residing atop eight Portland buildings are part of a global study – led by the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland – that could influence green roof design to maximize habitat potential.

Researchers in San Francisco and Mexico City are conducting similar studies to compare biodiversity on green roofs in different climates.

“There has been a lot of research on the stormwater benefits and energy benefits, but in Portland we haven’t done a lot of research of the habitat benefits,” she said.

Gonsalves, who is seeking a master’s degree in environmental science management, said hard data from the study of the habitat value of green roofs will provide yet another incentive for building owners to install them.

“We know that the urban environment is very complex, but there is a large amount of biodiversity in small patches,” she said. “We want to encourage more businesses to do this so we can provide more habitat. We also want to show there is value – that it’s providing habitat value in the city.”

Her research compares the impact of irrigation on insect diversity and plant growth on different types of green roofs. Along with insect counts, the study will analyze irrigation and temperature data collected with soil sensors. Initial findings indicate that it may not be necessary to irrigate green roofs – a potential cost savings for building owners, Gonsalves said.

“I have one roof that doesn’t have irrigation and it looks great,” she said. “If the vegetation looks just as good and the beetles look just as good, why (irrigate)?”

To conduct her research, Gonsalves gained permission from Portland green roof owners to place small cups in the soil that trap insects when they fall in. Traps on the ground near the buildings serve as the control.

When Gonsalves started pursuing a master’s degree at PSU last fall, she wanted to do research on green roofs. She reached out to Casey Cunningham, a landscape architect with the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services. He told her he was seeking a graduate student to participate in the Zurich University of Applied Sciences research, and then helped her gain access to many of the Portland green roofs used in the study.

Roofs in the study include the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine, Tri-City Water Pollution Control Plant, Central Wine Warehouse and Hamilton West apartments.

BES staffers have researched biodiversity on green roofs to encourage more to be built in Portland, but the Zurich University study will be far more comprehensive, Cunningham said. In Switzerland, such research has already led to changes in green roof design to provide habitat for an endangered bird species. The impact could be similar in Portland, he said.

“It could influence how we design eco-roofs in future,” he said.

Gonsalves started testing Portland green roof biodiversity in April and intends to wrap up data collection this month. She hopes to conduct a similar study next summer, during the height of insect activity, with more Portland green roofs included.

Comparing insect counts on different green roofs will help determine which designs make ideal wildlife habitat, Gonsalves said. The eight green roofs in this summer’s study are divided in half between ones with thick soil and high vegetation and others with thinner, gravelly soil and smaller succulent plants.

Research by PSU and other institutions is invaluable to the green roof designers, builders and suppliers, said Elizabeth Hart, market manager of green roofing for roofing materials supplier Tremco. The data will help Tremco staffers tweak green roof designs, soil blends and plant selections to create more effective installations that support habitat and other goals, she said.

“We’re huge on performance-based metrics,” Hart said.

Gonsalves said she monitors beetles because their presence is often a sign of a healthy habitat. She’s already encouraged by the presence of rove beetles on many of the green roofs in the study.

“A normal soil system would have them,” she said. “That’s a good sign that the roofs are being colonized by the right kinds of (insects).”

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We get a lot of press releases trying to woo us to cover the “biggest/first/greenest” projects in the Portland-metro area. Most of the time, we give the releases the once-over and decline with a “congratulations, but …” response.

That was almost the fate of the release that arrived yesterday about the green roof on top of Walmart‘s Hayden Meadows store, which was promoted as the largest installation of its kind in the area. But just as we were about to hit the delete button, we received another bit of news about the green roof, a tidbit that added that little something extra that turned our “no thanks” into a “yes, please.”

The Walmart roof is big – 92,000 square feet big. A little less than half of that space – 40,000 square feet, to be exact – features green roof. The rest of the area is a bare white membrane surface. The comparison-and-contrast potential is exactly what makes the roof the perfect place for a two-year experiment that will be led by David Sailor, the director of Portland State University’s Green Building Research Lab.

We’ve written about Sailor, who also teaches mechanical engineering at PSU, in the past. He was part of a team that back in 2010 set up an experiment on top of a PSU science building to determine whether eco-roofs could help keep solar panels cool.

For the Walmart roof study, Sailor and PSU students will spend 24 months gathering data collected by a a rooftop weather station and “scores of sensors” spread across the green roof. The green roof itself is divided into three sections, each featuring different vegetation and varying soil types and depths.

Sailor and his students won’t be alone as they conduct their research. The city of Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services will track stormwater runoff from the green roof. The��Cadmus Group, an environmental consulting firm,��will study how air conditioner units on the roof perform. The Audubon Society will even get in on the action by counting the numbers and types of birds that visit the green roof.

The research project also will extend beyond Portland to Chicago, where similar studies will be conducted on the green roof of a Walmart store in that city. The resulting data from both study areas, according to Sailor, could have a worldwide reach when it comes to developing strategies to improve how green roofs perform.

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Crews with began work Friday on a project to repair and replace sewer pipes on Southeast Cesar Chavez Boulevard for Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services. The street will be closed for up to three weeks between Hawthorne Boulevard and Division Street while around-the-clock work is performed. The work is part of the $6 million Rose City Sewer Project, which will repair or replace aging sewer pipes at eight different sites in the city.

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July is the heart of summertime. Kids playing under sprinklers, leisurely walks across verdant park lawns and sun tea slowly brewing on the windowsill. It also marks the beginning of the city’s new fiscal year and rate increases to pay for all that care-free summertime fun. What, you think fun is free?

The Portland Bureau of Environmental Services�� today that residential monthly bills for sewer and storm water services increased 6 percent, the latest rate increase to pay for maintenance of the system and capital improvements such as (combined sewer outflow) and the�� to meet EPA standards on municipal water quality.

To view a complete 2011-2012 rates, click��

And here’s a video:

– Peter Beland

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