Pandemic puts Tacoma economy in the toilet, but TAGRO is a shutdown success story

With the City of Tacoma reeling from a projected $67 million budget shortfall, it’s worth taking a moment to recognize a municipal operation that’s going gangbusters, expanding its footprint and increasing revenues by nearly a third this year.

Let’s hear it for Tacoma Grow, better known as TAGRO, the city’s award-winning horticultural mix of sand, sawdust and pasteurized wastewater biosolids.

Or to put it less delicately, your poop after it’s processed into exceptionally good gardening components.

Ironically, TAGRO is having a record year for the same reason that Tacoma’s economy is in the toilet: the COVID-19 pandemic.

Stuck mostly at home for five months by order of the governor, Washingtonians are obsessively working on house, landscaping and gardening projects. At a recent City Council meeting, Mayor Victoria Woodards said (admitted?) that she’d finally invested in her first bag of TAGRO, a product that’s been on the market since the early 1990s.

“I have a beautiful front lawn this year,” Woodards said, “and that’s only because I had time because of COVID to be home and work in my yard.”

The bottom line is that 200,000-plus Tacomans doing their business has turned into a fruitful side business for the city’s environmental services department.

TAGRO sales are on pace to double this year; retailers bought 26,250 bags of premium topsoil and other products through July, compared to 15,500 bags all of last year. Revenues are expected to rise from around $666,000 in 2019 to more than $850,000 in 2020, said program manager Dan Thompson.

Of course you have to spend money to make money, and TAGRO’s growth spurred the need for more storage. The City Council recently approved a five-year lease for a 8,900-square foot Hilltop warehouse — nearly double its current space — conveniently located near the central wastewater treatment plant.

That’s great for the city and for commercial distribution. What hasn’t changed is the location of the famous TAGRO “free pile” at the plant on Portland Avenue, where local green thumbs can grab a shovel and help themselves.

Sadly, the city shut down the pile to comply with pandemic sanitation and social-distancing guidelines. We hope officials find a safe way to reopen it before this bountiful season is over. Ideally, Tacomans will again be allowed to freely taketh a portion of what they, ahem, freely giveth.

“A lot of gardeners would come down and get the free stuff; they’re not very happy right now,” said Dan Eberhardt, the city’s biosolids supervisor who’s been with the program since the start.

While TAGRO demand is way up this year, supply is another story. People are flushing more at home, Eberhardt said, but the normally steady flow of waste materials from restaurants is sharply down.

Good thing the city built up a surplus before this year’s rush began.

So we take this opportunity to salute Tacoma’s wastewater treatment pioneers for their ingenuity and success. They should be commended first as environmental caretakers and now as revenue generators.

In times of crisis, we should stop and smell the roses. There’s a fair chance they were planted with TAGRO.