Staff Writer
From staff reports
CARTHAGE, Mo. —
Chances are “better than even” that Renewable Environmental Solutions will resume operations, Mayor Mike Harris said Tuesday.
Harris offered that assessment during a meeting of the Carthage City Council and said it was based on discussions in recent meetings with officials of the plant that, until March 2009, processed poultry by-products to produce biodiesel and other materials.
The mayor cited two meetings in the last week, one with plant officials and another with plant officials and potential investors who are considering backing a plant start-up. He said officials are working to line up financing and are offerig no time line on when the plant might resume operation.He said company officials say the plant will process waste oil and grease, but will not rule out the eventual proceesing of animal by-products."They said it will be an odor-free operarion," he said. “I told them I’m from Missouri, and they’ll have to show me.”
Company officials “were very open with me” in the discussions which Harris said left him “cynical, but hopeful.
“I’d like to see them re-open, with an odor-free operation, because Carthage needs the jobs,” he said. “But I told them if there was an odor problem, I’d do everything in my power to shut then down.”
Financial problems shut the operation down in March 2009, just before Changing World Technologies, the RES parent company, filed for bankruptcy protection, citing debt and other financial problems.
The plant had been a source of odor complaints since it opened in 2004; it received multiple citations from the state and at one point, former Gov. Matt Blunt ordered the plant closed until it could control odors.
In 2005, Carthage joined the Missouri attorney general’s office in filing public-nuisance lawsuit. The action was settled and RES installed a thermal oxidizer and other odor control equipment that company officials said addressed the problem. But complaints continued. The city lobbied the state to impose stricter odor controls, then adopted its own odor control ordinance.
