[Music] we will call to order the Planning Commission meeting for September 18th 2024 welcome everybody that's here welcome Dean face is huge we will start with the Pledge of Allegiance I pledge to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic stands one nation under God indivisible with libery and justice for all next item is to look for an approval of the meeting agenda this is Barb uh so moov this is Bethany I'll second it's been Motion in second I will call for the vote Scott I Barb I Bethany I Robin I ly I next is the discussion of the mtw truck wash Cup on Hornsby Avenue we had the public hearing so now it's our meeting to have a discussion are there any discussions to be I'll start if you want me to um so maybe Jack could answer this or Janet but thanks for the traffic study for loves my concern is that when this was done loves built their building but they ended up having to take out 14 parking spots because of the traffic in the flow I just don't want a set of Precedence and not require another one and then have another business come in and we require one and they say well you didn't make them do it so I'm totally coming from the standpoint that this had to be loves had to redo be their parking spots be so this wasn't exactly good and then now I do realize that some of the trucks in the truck wash are going to already have been there cuz they're at loves but there is going to be some new traffic and I don't want to set precedence to not ask for a traffic study when new business go in so Janet do you want I I can speak to it a little bit since I was here when they did this um and uh Dean chime in because I know you're familiar with this too but my understanding is the traffic study was primarily to address the traffic coming on and off of 97 not in their parking lot so I the fact that they took 14 um spots off that had nothing to do with this traffic study that has this traffic study was is our our trucks going to be lined up down um Hornsby or are they going to be lined up on 97 trying to get in and out of there and are they going to have a problem making that turn and that that's what this addressed so it didn't have anything to do with the parking parking lot Dean do you have anything you want to add you're muted mute there I are I don't have anything else I I tend to agree with Janet the these are two remarkably different uses um and and the applicant is complying with all of the parking requirements and just based on the difference in volumes from uh loves versus a use like this I I I have no concerns whatsoever okay um this is Barb um my concerns with commercial truck washing businesses hinge on uh as I said before uh the water consumption when we had the hotel go in and it was authorized there was a concern about uh adequate water pressure in the freeway District when the asphalt plant went in it was approved um with no concern by the previous mayor and Council regarding the lack of public water supply and the lack of a fire hydrant in case of a fire until the fire marshal addressed that my current concern is the depletion of fresh uh water supply by a business that does not plan to use a closed loop water recycling system that can reclaim up to 85% of the water and filter out contaminants that may impact groundwater the City Public Works director has gone on the record on page 12 indicating that the mtw Truck Wash has a minimal to no impact on the city's system as a citizen my concern is to safeguard the environment the water con conservation has become a critical uh subject throughout the country evidenced by the concerns of government agencies during 2021 drought and the pollution control agency has stressed the importance of and responsibility to manage our and conserve our water researches reclaiming treating and using reusing Waste Water by commercial truck washing businesses can dramatically reduce their dependence on our freshwater sources and prevent the release of contaminants into our environment so that's my concerns with businesses that don't reclaim the water so I'm going to go back to the last meeting when we were talking about the Cannabis and Robin was giving us an explanation of how they recycle the water to use for the plants is there any way you can recycle water for the car wash oh yeah yes it's proven yeah that's what I'm saying yeah I mean I'm asking them so you I mean have you have you considered that consider was yes yeah can you step up to the mic so we can put this on the record thank [Music] you and then give your name and address please hi Mark fear Car Wash Technologies been a business person in force like for 30 years been in the car wash industry for 30 years I build and service car wash us over 200 of them in the metro area and I have information about reclaim and there's pros and cons and where it can be used and where it can't be James Sky uh live in Columbus 8173 West Broadway Bros sky 8173 West Broadway Avenue so Amy have you thought about that anymore since we talked about it at the last meeting so there's problems with reclaim on a uh truck wash because of the variety of the vehicles that you have to wash you're not able to use friction and so a bulk of it is done with chemistry and touchfree and some hand prep work um reclaimed water can be cleaned more than one time a basic reclaim system uh once that reclaim water is purified to phase one there's still debris and particle in it which will clog all the nozzles and jets that we use to clean the vehicle within days and so you won't it's very it'll be very difficult to maintain that equipment to work properly there are California sites that are using you know uh very little fresh water but they all use some fresh water but when you reclaim water on a phase one it can't be reused with any chemistry most of the washes that I build today are like what you see the big Mister the Tommy type washes and we do put some reclaimed products in them uh equipment in them to purify some water most of that water is used for uh an underbody flush or a main thing that we use it for is you're seeing these new plastic dual Drive belts and so we have to flush them continuously through the wash process to minimize debris that causes extreme wear on that piece of equipment and if you were to use fresh water for that it would cost a lot and waste a lot so we use very little in the chemical or the rinsing because it leaves we can't get good quality it leaves streaking and marking on the vehicles when again because of the touchfree and the such variation of the truck you just can't use friction there's just too many variables on those types of vehicles um so in this application it's going to be very difficult to get any quality reclaimed water to to be used during the wash process um you know from a a pollution standpoint to the environment um you know I'm not an engineer and I'm not the one that changes the rules and and how we do things but historically we used to have a large sand trap storage tank usually inside the building catches you know dirt sand and then it would flow to A flammable waist trap and then it would flow to the city and the purpose of the flammable waist trap is to uh catch and absorb any type of oils or fuels or anything because they're they're lighter than water and they'll float to the top but they won't get discharged um which makes sense and a sand trap is typically a 500g container when we do a reclaim system we do a similar thing with a large sand trap followed by three large septic type tanks and the purpose of those tanks is to get the sediment to drop out continuously through that flow of water and then through a flammable waste trap and then to the Sewer and we do that especially in a reclaim system because the reclaim system is only capable of so much cleaning and so the hope is by the time we hit that third or fourth tank most of the sediment is settled and dropped out before we try to grab it flush it cyclonic and dump it back into one of the tanks um and lately what's changed it happened to me in the city of Bloomington and it just happened to me on a new construction in uh maple Grove they've changed the flammable waste trap we still put a storage tank in the middle they put the flammable waste trap in the front side and then they push it through the tanks and then they push it to the city so if something somehow gets into the system the flammable waste trap is no longer really where it should be to separate the oils and the fuels to prevent pollution but again that's that's what the code is that's what they're telling us to do and that's how they've told us to design it so we have to follow the code right or wrong that's the code you know I think it's being done backwards but that's not my job um so I you know I I I've heard different discussions about not having a water tower and being concerned with providing water to the business and the residents and when the tanker truck is filled at the racetrack it sounded like it put a pretty big impact on your water pressure I don't know what they use but it sounds like they're using somewhere in the neighborhood of a four or S 6in fire hose that can probably flow several hundred gallons per minute when it does that process um I believe this site does not have to be sprinkled or called mod so when I so if you don't have to sprinkle the size of the water line that comes in the building is way smaller um when I did my one of my buildings in Forest Lake they asked me to put a 8 in waterline in a 4,000 square foot building that wasn't required to be sprinkled which was a little Overkill and an extreme cost and then coming out of this 8 in water line I have a 1-in copper pipe and when you have a sprinkler system they need a big water line because they need that volume to put out the fire which makes sense putting in a 4in waterline into the building makes sense for for long-term building use should that building use change someday but reality is we can run this whole car wash on a 2in line and we would normally put a 2in rpz which is your backflow preventer which prevents lutant and chemical getting back into the water system but we have found that there's a pressure drop in that and it isn't the flow it's the pressure drop and that pressure drop brings the pressure down to some of our equipment that has safety switches on it that run off a pressure and if the pressure drops the equipment shuts down so we will usually oversize the rpz Val because we don't want a pressure drop and then we can bring that pipe size back down to 2 in to supply the equipment so when the car washes running at full capacity both Bays um it could pull about 100 gallons a minute Max not several hundred and maybe some of the numbers that have been floating around in discussed because everything goes in Cycles um it's approximately 350 gallons of water during a 15-minute cycle uh which happens four times an hour um so it's kind of like I think it's like ocean water right we have a lot of ocean water but there's a lot of expense and it's very difficult for a m municipality or a l large water facility to to extract the salt to make it drinkable when you deal with reclaim doesn't matter what reclaim system you have in the world none of them can address Salt and we're in a state that uses salt to clean the roads so when the water gets to a certain level around 2,000 parts per million of salt we can't clean a car so when you have a closed system or a large reclaim system you're going to call a tanker truck in and you're going to pump 20 30,000 gallons of water out of these storage tanks thanks well what happens after that can't run the car wash till we refill the pool so now we take it and have to refill the pool which will put you know then we're going to want bigger water lines to fill them faster um so reclaim has a place it's just with this type of variety of vehicle we just don't have a lot of options to produce water quality that can clean a truck and not leave milky scummy greasy type product on the vehicle and when you use reclaim water again it's a little bit hard to understand and how it makes sense sometimes because if I put 20 gallons of reclaimed water on your car in theory I need 25 plus gallons of fresh water to make sure I get all the reclaim water rinsed off off so it doesn't leave the film so there's kind of a balancing act when you do use reclaim and how you use it how you rinse it off so again it's just I like to try to save water where we can you know we use spotf free systems which is reverse osmosis which purifies water till you know our our objective is less than five TDS total dissolvable solids left in the water so that when you leave there's no spots on your car and these are used in 90% of every car wash but for every gallon of water I or every two gallons of water I take in I only make one gallon of good water most places take that second gallon of water and throw it out we take it and we put it in a storage tank because it's good water it's soft water we don't care if it has TDS because we're just using it to clean the car and we're going to rinse it anyways with spot free so when it comes to like the RO systems we claim 100% of that water um because it's good water and water costs money so anywhere we can reduce water there's a cost savings to run in the business so we're always going to try to save water we're going to try to run the equipment at its fastest speed possible because obviously the faster it goes the less water it uses the less water it uses the less it costs us um so that's kind of why reclaim isn't like a really great application here um what questions do you guys have that I can try to answer any other questions while they're there so you're saying reclaiming water is bogus that it serves no purpose it can be used in environments like in touch free so on the on the front half of the wash when we put chemistry on we have to use soft water that's clean and then when the brushes hit the car we can use dirtier reclaim water to scrub dirt and do what we need to do and lubricate the brushes and get some of that dirt off the car but after that process we have to rinse it with fresh water um Bobby's Car Wash over on Highway 65 uh doesn't have sewer and water and it's a closed system but it's all friction and uh when it was originally engineered in design not by me or my company they opened the brand new business and within 2 weeks they had a shut down and they've had to pump those storage tanks about every 6 days around 35,000 gallons and they were using reclaim water sporadically and they couldn't clean cars and they you know they couldn't even open their business they open closed open closed which again just proved that yes you can use some reclaim in certain areas but you have to use fresh water with some chemistry and in the rinsing process and to make our old water and so we had to add a little bit of fresh water to the site over and above the way it was designed and uh ultimately it ended up costing the customer money because they're going to have to pump the tanks every 6 days I believe the holiday in Ham Lake has the same situation where they literally pump their tanks every 3 days they don't have enough storage but again when you and and it's and they have reclaim but when you pump the tank dry you have to refill it because otherwise nothing works and circulates so in the tunnels and the frictions you can use reclaim water even in some of the IM automatic touch freeze that don't have the spinning turbo type nozzle design that create power impingement and what we use to get clean the nozzle size is bigger and more open so if dirt needs to pass through it it can actually get through it but we still go back and rinse with fresh water and put the wax on with fresh water and put spot free on with fresh water so it's it's you know yeah I mean and there's there's there's there's a phase 2 reclaim call it clarifier which will take phase one reclaim water and purify to another level that can be used with chemistry but again if it has debris in it it will cause nozzle or or plugging of the nozzles in the in the system that is used for trucks so it's tougher when you don't have friction it's really tough it just it's a struggle you can't you almost can't do it nothing's impossible but you almost can't do it and then back to the Salt there's no way to get rid of it so you have to pump you can't put a timeline on it it it's a monitoring process that when that 2,000 salt lever salt level is hit you have to pump the tanks so you have to introduce fresh water again so it's kind of a seesaw game thank you thank you Dean did you have anything you wanted to add not about water um the the city staff have indicated that the city is capable of providing for this particular business and while all discussions about conservation or other environmental issues are always appropriate in meetings like this and and that is a function of the planing commission and the city council to put those questions forward the the basis for all of our approvals um are whether or not we're consistent with ordinance requirements and at on on this topic we have no standards requirements guidelines anything related to water reuse for truck washes and so I would o only caution that that may not be a valid issue in a decision on recommending for or against this particular conditional use permit well it's just a learning process and we all get to learn what it's all about and I don't want to open a car wash how's that after learning all about it so it was a very helpful explanation I mean I feel like so many of these environmental problems that are real problems that are you know important problems but there's not like a good solution most of the time and there are solutions that sound really nice but there's always Hang-Ups there's always you know problems usually and so it's helpful to to hear your perspective that it's not just like oh we'll just reclaim it it'll you know it's not as simple as that and it usually isn't with these things which is unfortunate but I appreciate the the thorough explanation any other discussion Robin Scott nothing okay then the discussion I will look for a motion this is Scott I'll make a motion to approve this is Bethany I'll second motion's been made and second I will call for the vote Scott I Barb Bethany I Robin I Lynn ik because there's really like Dean said there's nothing we it fits I I really appreciate the explanation and it's just our job to worry and ask the questions about environmental traffic um but as far as the ordinances and everything there was really nothing we can do so that will be recommended to the City Council next week September 25th 6:00 p.m. right here and then it's up to them to give you your final go ahead good luck awesome thank you thank you appreciate it next item is public open for if there's anybody that would like to address the Planning Commission anybody online we will move on to planning commissioner's report and I will start off that this weekend is Fall Fest Friday night at the races the mayor has his shirt on Saturday here at the park in City Hall and Sunday Worship in the park and a pancake breakfast and it's not going to rain you heard it here first um but come out and enjoy yourself it's going to be a lot of fun don't forget Friday yes and I said Friday night at the races drive-in movie um so there's seven businesses that sponsored races this year which is up from four last year so it should be a really good turnout and um I just want to take this opportunity to thank our businesses if anybody listens to the replay um without our businesses in town supporting this event we wouldn't be able to do what we do and I think it's really great that the businesses invest in the community so anybody else have a report not me no I don't oh Planning and Zoning report I also have a fun one speaking about Columbus businesses uh Columbus is happening um pretty soon as well on October 4th at Running Aces I'll be sending out some more details of that but it will be um a opportunity to meet the business owners and operators throughout Columbus and meet and greet and sit and chat is it in the morning it will be in the afternoon afternoon evening 5 you are all invited you are all invited welc we more details so Saturday it is a no it's a Friday THS Friday okay is it October 3rd I might have said the wrong date I believe it is October 3rd and it is a Thursday I just know I have a grand new grandbaby do on October 4th and it's a Friday okay okay yeah I have the third in my okay so it's the third it is the third new girl day okay no what's that movie called Mean Girls Mean Girl day Thursday October 3rd at Running Aces B happy hour and it's 4: to 6 so huh 400 p.m. to 6 4: to 6 okay I believe that's what I have on my calendar any other announcements if not I would look for a motion to adjourn this is Bethany I will make a motion to adjourn this is Robin I'll second it's been motion and second I will call for the vote Scott I Barb I Bethany I Rob I ly I meeting adjourned at 629 [Music]