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Marco Island City Council addressed long-standing concerns from a resident Monday night about disruptions from a city facility bordering his property.

While they expressed sympathy for his plight, council also expressed confidence in the city’s Public Works Department to continue recent efforts to mitigate those concerns. City Council voted unanimously to allow the department to relocate 12 employees to the plant, plus move some storage operations there because of construction at the northernmost plant.

That vote came in spite of a 5-1 vote by the city’s Planning Board to recommend rejection of the request.

Councilor Wayne Waldack shared his experiences with the council from seven different mornings when he visited the city’s South Water Treatment Plant before 7 a.m. to listen and observe the level of noise and disruption there.

"It was quiet out there. It was boring," Waldack said.

He said the pickup trucks that passed through the gate those mornings were polite, showing particular care when passing through the gate of the facility. Security guidelines mandate that anyone entering the facility has to unlock the gate before entering and close and lock the gate behind themselves. It requires a few stops and starts, but Waldack said the vehicles were "as quiet as a normal vehicle could be in passing through there."

Mike Sullivan’s property line abuts the treatment plant property, and his children’s bedrooms are at the back of his house, closest to the fence line. He has appeared before City Council and the Planning Board on numerous occasions to appeal for construction activity to stop at the plant.

"It’s going on two years now that we have put up with the noise, the smell, the dust," he told council. "It’s affected my life, it’s affected my neighbors’ lives."

He agreed with Waldack, that the noise had been lessened lately. However, he chocked that up to the workers being warned to be quiet — something he said he feared would fade with time. In the past, he said, decreases in noise have been brief.

"From what I’m seeing at this point, the city is trying to become a much better neighbor to you," Councilor Jerry Gibson said. "You can’t judge on what has happened in the past. We’re moving forward now."

Public Works Director Rony Joel’s request to council had been amended since he presented it to the Planning Board. He added two rows of 8-foot-tall hedge to the site plan, one on the inside of the service road, cocooning the modular trailers and parking area used by the 12 workers on the site, and another on the outside of the road, roughly 5 feet from the concrete wall separating private property from city property.

"If they do everything they say they’re going to do, I actually wouldn’t have a problem with it," Sullivan said.

Council also directed Joel to examine the option of rearranging some of the storage containers and the parking area on the site to add an additional noise buffer for the residents. Additionally, he said his department had put out a bid for an electric gate at the facility entrance to minimize the disruptions caused by vehicles stopping and starting in and out of the property.

The discussion was held following an earlier presentation by Joel on council’s options for staging new construction on the island. Staging activities for another project recently concluded at the south plant — part of Joel’s explanation for why noise and disruption at the site was so common in recent months.

Along with the south plant, Joel also presented council with the option of staging materials for 19 sewer lift stations on property comprising Veterans’ Community Park or on a leased lot.

However, council asked Joel to investigate a fourth option: leasing land off the island to store trucks, equipment and truckloads of dirt. Each lift station takes two to three weeks to complete, with the bulk of the intensive work happening during a one-week period when 40 truckloads of dirt are removed, the station installed and 38 truckloads of dirt replaced.

Of all of the options presented to council, the most expensive would be leasing commercial land, which would cost each new sewer customer $40 apiece. Using the south plant would be free, and use of Site B on Veterans’ Park would cost $2 per customer. With the rising cost of gas and the premium on land, Joel warned that the fourth option could be more costly than any other possibility.

"It’s not economical. They don’t have 40 trucks," Joel said of the contractor. "They have three or four that have to jockey back and forth removing the soil over one day."

The conversation revolved around one key dilemma: How much are residents — specifically new sewer customers — willing to pay for peace and quiet? Joel pointed out that customers in the first four sewer districts were charged no costs associated with lift station staging because the staging was all done for free on city property.

"There are alternatives, it just costs money," Joel said. "And what is the breaking point between what’s acceptable? You’ve had 2,000 people pay $0 for lift station staging. Now you’re going to have people pay X dollars."

Joel told council he would research those alternatives and come back to council with cost estimates at the next regular meeting, April 21. The city will delay the contracting bid process — originally scheduled to end in a week — as a result.