Supervisors, Valero discuss truck parking safety concerns

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com 

Parked semitrailers filled with corn waiting to be delivered to Valero are causing traffic concerns on the road leading to the ethanol plant, Floyd County supervisors said Tuesday.

Representatives of the company were invited to the Board of Supervisors regular meeting to discuss the issue.

As part of the discussion a video was played that showed 40 or 50 semis recently parked on the shoulders of Quarry Road and 185th Street heading north to Valero Renewables Fuels northwest of Charles City.

Supervisor Mark Kuhn said, “My point of view, and I know to the (county) engineer and also to the sheriff, the parking of semis and occasional tractors and wagons alongside our county blacktop is a clear and present danger to the motoring public. And we’ve known this for some time.”

Kuhn said the county recently paid about $1.5 million to rebuild Quarry Road, and he was concerned about the safety as well as the damage to the shoulder of the road that was being done by the trucks.

Frank Blaine, the current Valero plant manager, who is moving to be manager of a newly acquired Valero plant in Lakota later this week, said the Charles City plant processes about 145,000 bushels of corn a day, Monday through Friday. That corn is received from about 200 trucks per day as well as some rail cars.

He said the problem primarily occurs in the fall when co-ops hire extra drivers, but they don’t have anything to do when it rains so they are sent to deliver corn to the ethanol plant. The exceptionally wet September this year magnified the problem, he said.

“We don’t necessarily manage the trucks,” Blaine said. “They’re not our trucks. They belong to farmers, they belong to elevators, co-ops. And the way that the corn is sourced, some of it comes from elevators, some comes from producers, and a lot of it comes via an elevator but direct off the farm and the farmers deliver it.”

Kuhn said one option is to begin writing tickets for trucks parked illegally, but that’s not an option he wants.

Floyd County Sheriff Jeff Crooks said that based on what he saw on the video, every one of the trucks was parked illegally.

“We could have cited every truck in that video,” he said. “They are across the white line. By law you have to be 18 inches on the far side of the white line. So every truck out there was in violation.”

Crooks said his main concern was the curve south of the plant where 185th Street turns into Quarry Road, because if trucks are parked there the other traffic on the road can’t see oncoming vehicles

He said he didn’t want to write tickets for farmers, and if they could just keep trucks from parking along the curve it would be a big help.

Kuhn said Valero should put in enough onsite parking to handle the trucks, but Blaine asked how much would be enough.

“We can have about an hour and 20 minutes of trucks either in the staging area or in the plant,” Blaine said. “We process 31 trucks an hour. So we can have approximately 40 trucks on site — 30 in the staging area and 10 somewhere in the plant.”

He said there wouldn’t be enough room on Valero’s property to handle the number of trucks that were shown in the video, but that’s a situation that only happens occasionally.

“We’ve been receiving 230 trucks a day for the last five-six weeks and there’s no trucks on the road,” he said.

Jason Urdahl, who is in charge of grain procurement for the Charles City Valero plant, said his boss, Valero’s overall director of grain procurement, had three recommendations to help deal with the problem:

• Try to get the big suppliers such as the elevators to allocate their deliveries to cut back on busy days to reduce traffic.
• Expand hours to add more time to receive corn. Valero currently receives corn from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., and perhaps that could be lengthened, probably on the afternoon end.
• Increase communications with suppliers through text messages and other means to tell them when the staging area is full and when there is room for more, “kind of like a green light, yellow light, red light,” Urdahl said.

Both Kuhn and Supervisor Linda Tjaden said they valued Valero’s contribution to the local economy and didn’t want to take steps to hurt the company, but the truck parking is a serious safety concern.

Tjaden and County Engineer Dusten Rolando both suggested more communication between Valero and suppliers.

Blaine said, “We’ve made the request to the elevators, the cooperatives. It’s really tough to get them to change their behavior.”

He said the company would take another look at what it could do.

“We will definitely take a look at what it’s going to cost us to put in some type of onsite parking, but I won’t guarantee that what we put in is ever going to be enough,” he said.

Another option would be to get more corn by rail, he said.

“It’s not locally sourced, but we have the ability to do that,” Blaine said.

Also at the meeting Tuesday morning, the supervisors:

• Approved a resolution to sell $6.01 million in general obligation bonds to begin funding the new county law enforcement center and courthouse update project. The total interest rate including fees and other expenses will be 3.44 percent for this issue, said Jeff Heil, senior vice president of Northland Securities, the county’s bond underwriter. The total $13.5 million project had been approved by county voters based on an estimated bond cost of 3.5 percent, Heil said, so this issue is below that.
• Approved requesting proposals for the demolition of three properties, at 901 Gilbert, 101 S. Jackson and 111 S. Jackson, that the county now owns and that need to be removed to make way for the law enforcement center project.
• Approved requesting proposals for the law enforcement center project construction manager.
• Set rates for the Sheriff’s Office to provide law enforcement services to county communities at $4 per capita annually for Colwell, Floyd, Marble Rock and Rockford, and for $25 per hour for Nora Springs. The prices would be good for two years.