Something stinks about Onondaga County’s $23 million sewage sludge drying building — and it’s not just the fact that it is more than two years late, 50% over budget and, for a time, unsafe for workers to enter.
What smells is the veil of secrecy over the project. Is the county stonewalling to avoid embarrassment? Or are things worse than we already know?
A sludge dryer is just what it sounds like — a building where air circulates over sewer sludge (aka poop) to extract water from it. Dried-out sludge weighs less than waterlogged sludge, so disposing of it in a landfill costs less. The project was budgeted to cost $15 million and to save taxpayers $2 million a year in trucking costs…