FRANKFORT, Ky. — The Kentucky Department of Agriculture (KDA) announced last week it will begin to contract with a private fuel testing facility to conduct fuel sample tests, and close its motor fuel and pesticide testing lab in Frankfort.

The move comes in the wake of financial problems the lab has created since opening in 2008, while Richie Farmer was state agriculture commissioner. The Farmer administration touted the lab, which cost $3.1 million, as a money-maker to conduct all the tests Kentucky would need and to charge other states to do their testing.

That never panned out, said current KDA Commissioner James Comer. In fact, it was discovered the facility was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, according to information from KDA.

Comer said the lab couldn’t keep up with the Kentucky tests, let alone other states. He also said although the lab had the equipment and a full-time chemist for four years to do pesticide testing, there had never been any such test conducted.

“They never tested the first vial of pesticides. In fact, all the pesticides that we test in the department, we still mail to an out-of-state lab to be tested,” he said.

Comer said the previous administration made projections when requesting funding for the facility, based on the ability to perform 50 tests each day. “I can tell you we’ve had the University of Kentucky (UK) Center for Applied Research and Energy and other private testing companies come in and look at the fuel lab. The most tests we could run in one day, if we were at full capacity, would be 10,” he said.

Last July, he appointed an all-volunteer fuel lab task force to make recommendations on how to make the lab more productive. 

Its findings concluded the only way to do that was to shut it down and privatize the testing.

Core Laboratories of Deer Park, Texas, was chosen to perform the motor fuel testing at a cost of $330,000 per year.

“We will save the taxpayers as much as $600,000 after we finish decommissioning this facility,” Comer said. “We will continue to test motor fuel samples at random and respond to consumer complaints. Kentucky consumers will not be affected by this action.”

He noted at one time the Frankfort lab was about five weeks behind in its testing. 

The Texas facility will have results back within 36-48 hours.

No Kentucky companies responded to this Request for Proposal issued by KDA, but Comer said the UK Center for Applied Research and Energy is still being looked at as a facility that could eventually perform the tests.

The deal with the Texas lab will last a year, allowing time to see if the UK facility can perform the tests in an economically efficient manner. If so, the testing will be done there; if not, the Texas lab will continue the tests.

The fuel lab is but one of many missteps alleged in the Farmer administration. The two-term former commissioner was slapped with 42 ethics charges by the state’s Executive Branch Ethics Commission. That is a record and it could cost Farmer as much as a $5,000 fine per charge, according to a report issued by the commission.

By outsourcing the tests, significant savings should be noticeable immediately. Comer said the rent on the building where the testing lab was housed amounted to $200,000 annually, with average utility bills running $5,000 per month.