Almost a year after they were first asked, the Perry City Council at its June 19 meeting granted one perpetual easement to Dallas County and another perpetual easement to Tyson Fresh Meats, paving the way for relocating a section of the Raccoon River Bike Trail (RRVT) as part of Tyson’s expansion and reorganization of its Perry plant.
According to a statement from the Tyson corporate communications office, the Perry factory is “in the process of adding a 13,000-square-foot building expansion in order to adopt a modernized process for harvesting hogs. This expansion requires a truck turn-around area on the north side of the facility so that outgoing trucks could access the facilities loadout areas.”
Brady Welu, project engineer in Tyson Foods Inc.’s South Dakota offices, designed the Perry expansion and presented it at meetings in Perry and Adel, providing maps and plans for the project.
“Today the Raccoon Valley Bike Trail runs through this area,” the Tyson statement said. “We will be relocating the trail farther away from the facility, which will include planting over 180 trees and shrubs as well as native grasses.”
Representatives of the Tyson corporation first pitched the plan last year to the Dallas County Conservation Board, which liked the idea. Board Director Mike Wallace said Tyson agreed to pay both for the easement and the cost of relocating a portion of the RRVT.
“The bike trail is on our back side, and it’s not the area we’re most proud of,” Tyson Fresh Meats Plant Manager Mike Grothe told the conservation board. “We want to upgrade that area, so if we can put trees across there and plant that to make it look better, that’s our goal.”
The Dallas County Board of Supervisors signed off on Resolution 2017-0042 at their May 23 meeting, giving Tyson a perpetual easement on county property. Welu told the supervisors the easement “is needed to access the other side of the plant.”
At the same meeting, Wallace also urged “selling a small sliver of land to Tyson Fresh Meats to clean up the border.” The supervisors unanimously approved the execution of the purchase and sales agreement between Dallas County and Tyson Fresh Meats.
Moving the bike trail northward means building on the brownfield property owned by the city of Perry. Tyson agreed to pay the city of Perry a one-time easement payment of $1 per square foot or $3,046.
Consent to the city’s easement to Dallas County was also required from Sean Kennedy, project development director for Megawatt Photovoltaic Development Inc. His company has an easement on about 40 acres of the brownfield property, and Kennedy has proposed building an array of solar collectors that could generate as much as five megawatts of solar energy for use in the Perry area.
“We’re giving up about 2.4 acres to help the city and the county and Tyson,” Kennedy said, “just trying to be good neighbors.” He said his solar-farm project for Perry is still alive.
“Obviously, solar’s moving more slowly in Iowa than I’d hoped it would,” he said, “but we’re still working on the project and continue to look for a way forward with it. There’s still not a project of that size in Iowa, and we’re still hoping to have the first large-scale solar project in Iowa when the time is right.”
The RRVT already jogs northward as it passes Tyson Fresh Meats on the plant’s north side. Moving the bike trail farther north would make for a bigger jog and bring the trail near the historic roundhouse area, dating from the era when Perry was a railroading powerhouse.
Tyson Fresh Meats declined to say how much the job of moving the trail would cost, but Rich Voelker, the Snyder and Associates engineer who built the Raccoon River Valley Trail, said his back-of-the-envelope calculation of the cost of moving and rebuilding the section of trail north of Tyson’s was about $50,000.
Tyson was less reticent about the price tag on the wastewater facility it is upgrading at the Perry plant: “We are investing $23 million to upgrade our wastewater treatment facility at our Perry, Iowa, plant with the latest wastewater treatment technology. The project will provide additional treatment capacity to meet future requirements and is expected to be completed this fall.”
Suresh Kumar and Thabit Hamoud, environmental engineers with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, said Tyson was “very proactive” in upgrading its Perry wastewater treatment plant starting in 2013, about five years sooner than U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations would have required it.
Kumar said the Perry facility uses “some new, advanced processes,” including “construction of new anoxic basin, conversion of the existing aerobic digester tank to activated sludge process aeration basin, construction of a new aeration basin, construction of a new clarifier and the installation of new ferric chloride and polymer chemical feed system.”
Kumar said the upgrade in the Perry plant is needed because “production is going up.”
[…] continues at the Tyson Fresh Meats plant in Perry, where an upgraded wastewater treatment facility on the plant’s west side and new construction on the plant’s north side is now being […]