Today's News

Chiefland's sewer plant personnel have listened to a salesman and come up with a way to cut their energy use, cut fuel use, and cut the amount of sludge the City Water Reclamation Plant produces.

If you read the story in another part of this newspaper, you thought it was a story about money and saving energy.

Really, the story is about building relationships and trust.

Randy Wilkerson said it was his working relationship with a sales rep from TSC-Jacobs Group, the company that supplies the city with much of its wastewater equipment, that led to the savings.

With the site and design approval for a new structure, Chiefland Elementary School is hoping to put a dent in the 14 portable structures sitting on the south side of its sprawling campus.

The Levy County School Board members OK'd the plans for a 11,700-square-foot building that will house eight classrooms.

"They'll be replacing the portables," said assistant superintendent Jeff Davis at Tuesday's meeting. "They've (portables) been there since the school was built in 1993."

The staff at the Chiefland Water Reclamation Plant, the place where every toilet flush meets it end, have turned off two 40-horsepower fans that keep the smell down on the sludge digester.

It sounds like a pretty noxious idea.

But a change in the way sludge is separated from 168,000 to 170,000 gallons of wastewater daily means the smell emanating from the plant is that of money saved on the electric bill, blowers that no longer need maintenance, and less use of a petroleum-based chemical whose cost has been rising with crude oil prices.

My grandparents tuned in regularly to a radio segment called "The Swap Shop". For 15 minutes every day, people called in to offer something they had -for free or less than $20 or they called in to ask for items they needed.

It was the old-fashioned bartering system upgraded to the modern 20th century. With little or no money, you could get the products or services you needed in exchange for something you could offer up.