Bringing the Tajiguas Landfill up to expectations continues to absorb major amounts of money, but the outlays are bringing a significant milestone within reach. Most recently, the Santa Barbara Board of Supervisors approved on Tuesday a five-year contract worth $4.4 million to repair and maintain the Jenbacher engines that provide heat and power to the ReSource Center using the methane generated onsite. The improvements gained by contractor Northeast-Western Energy Systems’ work is expected to enable the facility to be fully operational by this summer.
Given the cycles of maintenance for the engines — two of them power the recycling efforts of the ReSource Center and two send electricity to SoCal Edison — the yearly costs are projected to run between $606,000 and $1.2 million over the five-year period. In fiscal 2022-23, the contract to maintain the engines was about $912,000 under the previous owner MSB Investors, said Jeanette Gonzales-Knight, deputy director for Public Works.
MSB Investors built and managed the ReSource Center — which began operations in July 2021 and is composed of a recyclables and organics separation building, an anaerobic digester to break down organics, and a composting unit — but MSB was fired by the county in December 2023 after a series of water and air quality violations were tagged. Other failures by each side are alleged in an ongoing lawsuit between the two parties. One claim made by the county involves a lack of “acceptance testing,” or quality assurance, of the anaerobic digester process at Tajiguas.
Once the county took over the management of Tajiguas in January 2024, the waste management division run by Gonzales-Knight, who is a civil engineer with an MBA degree, determined that deferred maintenance and improving engine performance and longevity would move the anaerobic digester facility toward acceptance testing of its reliability and capacity.
Optimizing the performance of the engines will help the ReSource Center fulfill its long-term “guaranteed energy production” agreement with Edison, Gonzales-Knight indicated. The pairs of Jenbacher 416 and 420 engines “are highly specialized equipment needed to operate and maintain publicly owned power and waste disposal systems,” she said in explaining why the contract was a bid-less one, per the Public Contract Code. The Brea-based Northeast-Western is the authorized service provider for Jenbacher, which is headquartered in Jenbach, Austria.
With the continuing contract with Northeast-Western, “the county expects to complete acceptance testing this year and move into ‘Full Operations’ by June 30, 2025,” Gonzales-Knight said.
