Nome Common Council tours Nome’s aging facilities

The Nome Common Council went on a tour of Nome’s public infrastructure and saw first-hand that work is needed to bring city buildings and equipment up to speed. 
The Beam Road landfill’s current cell is filling up and the garage is undersized. 
The monofill, on the west side of town, is running out of space. The Nome Recreation Center needs new boilers and the building itself is old, with a small weight room and locker rooms that need work. The Public Works Garage on Bering Street is too small for the machines it needs to store, and a fire in 2023 left the attic scorched.
City Manager Lee Smith said that the tour was organized to make sure council members could see what was happening in the community and understand decisions made by city administration. “I call it the smell test. You need to hear it, see it, touch it, understand it through education of what’s happening here,” Smith said.
Council members piled into a van that took them first to the landfill on the Beam Road. 
Trash blown about by the wind littered the tundra around the site and caught against the fences surrounding the area. The landfill is filling up, and only has a few years left in the current cell. A new cell will have to be dug out.  Public Works Supervisor Cole Cushman said the fences don’t provide adequate security for the site.
The landfill’s garage is too small. Cushman doubts it will fit the new trash compactor that’s coming this summer. “I don’t think it’s going to fit through the door,” he said. “It’s going to be a matter of inches.”
Next, the council members headed to the monofill. 
The monofill is also running out of space, and construction is ramping up in the region. Council Member Scot Henderson said that seeing the site was helpful. “We’ve got all this development and construction and demolition going on,” he said. “I understand a lot better now why there’s a huge need for an incinerator so that we can save space, we don’t have to bury all the trash.”
The Nome Recreation Center needs work as well. The weight room is too small and the locker rooms have bad ventilation. The building itself is old. Smith said the boilers are having issues. “We had what could have been a major fire near the workout room with one of the boilers,” he said.
Council Member Adam Lust pointed out in an interview with the Nugget that the Rec Center is used year-round and a public facing part of city infrastructure. “We’re a first-class city, we can do better than this,” he said.
Henderson echoed that point in a separate interview. He said the locker rooms need to be upgraded, the air handling systems improved and the boilers replaced. “These are all critical things. They have to be addressed, because if you let them get too far, then they become a health and safety issue,” he said.
Inside the Public Works Garage, it is cramped to the point where walking between vehicles requires turning sideways, and some of the machines cannot be stored outside in the cold. Smith said that the city will have to think about a new, larger building, maybe by where the snow dump is now. “Development’s going that way anyway,” he said. “That’s one of our big investments.”
The building has three snowplows – one from 2006, one from 2012 and one from 2020. Cushman said that the newest snowplow has issues. “It was made during COVID, we got it, and every single bolt was not tightened,” he said. “The hydraulic tank was not tightened, so we were losing three gallons of hydraulic every day we ran it.”
The second floor of the building is storage. If they ever rebuild the shop, Cushman said, they would move the break room upstairs. When council members toured the third floor, they used phone flashlights to find their way around. There were scorch marks on the wood from the 2023 fire.
The fire department is located next door in the same building and it is filled to the brim. When there’s snow on the ground, there’s not enough clearance for one of the trucks to leave without hitting the door. “The Fire Department has outgrown its building,” said Cushman.
Lust said that seeing the equipment and public works helped him better understand the issues the city faces. “We need to start budgeting or replacing some of that stuff,” he said.
A mechanic position is not filled, which slows repairs of machines and in turn hampers road repairs and grading. Cushman said he often has to step in when there’s a vacancy. “At the end of the day, the job that we have has to be done,” he said. “If I don’t have somebody to run the grader, guess what? I’m running the grader, because we’re still going to get complaints about potholes.”
Henderson said that the tour enabled him to have a better understanding of the situation with city buildings, equipment and deferred maintenance. “We have a lot of older buildings, a lot of deferred maintenance issues that need to be addressed,” he said. “The challenge will be trying to figure out where to get the funding to address some of these.”
“We have a shortage of space for the equipment fleet and for maintenance, that’s a critical issue,” he added. “We’ve got a lot of work to do to address some of this deferred maintenance.”
Henderson called the deferred maintenance issues acute. “We can’t obviously address them all at one time, but just starting to prioritize, and continue to move through it,” he said. “If we start to have a structured approach to addressing some of these needs, that’s the only way we’re going to get back on track.”
Lust said that Nome has to look forward. “If there’s one thing I think we lack right now is where we’re at now, where do we want to be 30 years from now, and what steps we can take to start building in that direction, right?”
City Manager Smith said that the city is applying for grants, but the money to pay for the repairs will have to come from the citizenry. “Ask the public what they want, ask them to prioritize, but also be very open and honest about cost,” he said.