MORGANTOWN – What’s it going to take for the Morgantown Utility Board to bring its combined sewer discharges into area waterways under the threshold set by federal and state regulatory agencies?
Likely a minimum of $150 million for starters.
Morgantown City Council heard Tuesday from Scott Stearns and Sam Hocevar representing Strand Associates regarding the findings of MUB’s updated Long Range Control Plan.
That plan is a federal requirement under the Clean Water Act that, in a nutshell, contemplates one question verbalized Tuesday by MUB Chair Erik Carlson.
“How do we keep what we flush down our toilets from going into our waterways?”
While it’s not pleasant to consider, combined sewer overflows are a fact of life in Morgantown and hundreds of communities across the country.
A combined sewer overflow, or CSO, is a product of a combined sewer system, meaning the system collects both wastewater and stormwater runoff in the same infrastructure.
During and immediately following rain events that overwhelm the system’s capacity, both are discharged untreated directly into streams, rivers and other bodies of water.
According to MUB, there are 21 CSO outlets along Deckers Creek and 17 along the Monongahela River. There is one each on Popenoe Run and Burroughs Run.
Stearns pointed out that complete separation of a combined system is considered all but impossible.
The goal, he said, is 85% capture.
“The control of 85% capture is written into the CSO long-term control plan guidance as presumptive that you’ll meet water quality standards if you remove 85% of the flow or mass from your CSO volume,” Stearns said.
Today, MUB is at 70%.
The cost of that additional 15% is considerable.
Hocevar walked council through groupings of projects ranging in estimated cost from $152 million to $201 million.
The recommendation of Strand Associates comes in at the lower end of that price range and initially includes two core projects.
The first would address one of the system’s most active CSOs, located at the Star City Wastewater Treatment Plant.
For an estimated $40.3 million, an ancillary wet weather facility would be constructed, likely on the neighboring MUB-owned property that formerly held 84 Lumber. Hocevar said adding that facility would allow the treatment plant to handle an additional 46 million gallons per day during wet weather, meaning the CSO at the plant wouldn’t be activated unless flows exceeded 67.8 million gallons per day.
This project alone would get MUB to an estimated CSO capture rate of 82%, according to Hocevar.
The second project, estimated at $65.7 million, would add another 3.3% to that metric by replacing the Deckers Creek Interceptor and adding a major pump station.
As you might expect, paying for all this work will require rate increases.
Carlson explained the increases would come in two phases. Initially, the work at the Star City Treatment Plant would come with an 11 cent increase per 1,000 gallons. The second project, addressing Deckers Creek, would later add 54 cents per 1,000 gallons.
As for who would be paying what, “Anything that flows into the Star City Plant would be paying for those upgrades,” he said of the treatment plant project. “Anything that flows through the Deckers Creek sewer would be paying for those upgrades.”
Carlson went on to caution that all the numbers presented in terms of estimated project costs are in today’s dollars. Hocevar said a conservative estimate of how long it would take to get the projects engineered and bid is two years.
“The numbers showed $150 million … We hope it’s $150 million. We hope it’s less than $150 million. We don’t know what it’s going to be until we have the designs done, and we have construction documents and we’re able to go out to bid with it,” Carlson said.
Mark Downs, who serves as city council’s MUB representative, said he wants the work to move forward “with as much priority as possible.”
“This is 100-year old infrastructure that we’ve inherited. It’s not going to be fun dealing with it. It’s going to be expensive, but we absolutely have to do it because the alternative is even uglier,” he said.
