Serious Concerns Over Water Treatment Plant

Dear Editor,

This last Waitsburg City Council meeting, held August 15th, left me with some serious concerns about city maintenance in general and the wastewater treatment facility specifically. The discussion revealed a problem with equipment that was identified years ago as being a problem. The immediate problem has now become an emergency situation, the outcome if no solution is found within the next 2-3 weeks is potential release of untreated or partially-treated waste into the river. This I believe comes with a $10,000 a day fine. There were several temporary solutions offered at the meeting; however, none of them were available or created enough capacity to truly stem the tide according to the city. I do know the city is doing its best to come up with a solution and I have confidence in Jim and his team.

My biggest takeaway from the meeting was that this known maintenance issue was identified over a decade ago, almost replaced five years ago, and is a technology all but one other Washington water treatment facilities have replaced. So how did this get to be an emergency? Even if this emergency finds a temporary solution, the cost will be much more to the city than had it been handled in a timely manner. The quote I heard at the meeting was approximately $300,000 for a new replacement belt press, which would take 6-12 months to put into place. Of course this does not take into consideration the cost of the remedial measures, such as trucking out raw sewage or renting temporary equipment to keep our heads above... Not to mention the $10k a day fine in a worst-case scenario.

I compare that with the article five years ago where the city was applying for a $200k grant that the city said would more than cover the cost to replace the current screw press.  I am just concerned that the current process to assess and address basic city maintenance has let us down this time and should be seriously looked into. Perhaps the screw press could have been ahead of the water meters for replacement. Not to say both aren’t important, the screw press just had a bigger probability for a costly emergency.

Lane Gwinn

Waitsburg