FAIRHOPE, Ala. — The City Council took action Monday to comply with state environmental laws regarding the handling of any PCB oils present in the city’s electric power system.

“I think it’s mandatory that we do this, since we’re not in compliance now,” said Councilman Lonnie Mixon at the work session prior to the April 27 council meeting.

The failure of the city to have a program for handling PCB oils came to light during work of the city’s Strategic Planning Steering Committee, said Mixon, who is a member of that group, which has been meeting with departmental staff to develop a strategic plan for the city.

The electric department should be documenting the handling and disposal of PCB oils and filing an annual report with the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, said Scott Sligh, city electric superintendent.

“We face a $37,000 (fine) each day per transformer for every day we don’t handle these materials correctly,” Sligh said.

Sligh said the city needs to hire a consultant at a one-time cost of $6,000 to develop a program for handling the toxic materials, and a $1,500 software package to manage the program.

ADEM visited the city 10 years ago and warned about the need for such a program, he said.

“And we still haven’t done anything about it?” Council President Debbie Quinn said.

The council voted unanimously at the work session for the electric department to initiate the program as described by Sligh.

The domestic production of polychlorinated biphenyls was banned in 1979, after the compound was determined to be a persistent organic pollutant that accumulates in animals, and studies showed it leaked from electric transformers and contaminated the soil at the bottom of utility poles. Although PCB use was banned in the 1970s in some open applications such as paints and cements, it is still allowed in some closed systems such as electric capacitors and transformers.

“We have tested the oil in our substation transformers, and they are not present there,” Sligh said after Monday’s council meeting. “They could be present in units on utility poles.”

A failure at one of the city’s substations in March caused a fire at the substation and power outages in the downtown business district. A news release issued by the city said the failed transformer contained non-PCB oil, which Sligh confirmed Monday.

During a status report from the Strategic Planning Steering Committee at the Monday work session, a PCB-oil handling program was identified as the most crtical need of the electric department.

A report submitted to the steering committee recently said that “currently no progam exists, thus opening the city to high liability. Software is needed to track oil and a system is needed to dipose of it properly. The total cost of a program would be less than $100,000 to implement and less than $5,000 annually to maintain. This is a high priority because of the potential liability if a problem occurs and ADEM is called in to inspect the situation.”