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City needs $97 million to upgrade water/sewer by 2030

By Katherine R. Dougan

Rate ImpactsNinety-seven million dollars is a number too large to comprehend. However, that’s what it will cost the City of Clinton to keep the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) from shutting down the City’s water/sewer system in 2030.

The situation is serious and costly for the City, as discharges are currently at capacity, even with the stop-gap improvements to the Lovett Wastewater Facility. Only by constructing a nineteen-mile pipeline to discharge into the Big Black River can Clinton meet criteria stipulated by MDEQ. The cost to run pipe and construct a new treatment plant to discharge into the Big Black is $97 million.

WGK Engineering is the consulting engineering firm for the City of Clinton. Greg Gearhart, a certified environmental engineer and partner at WGK who handles the firm’s water and wastewater departments, minced no words in explaining the situation to the mayor and Board of Aldermen at their first September meeting.

“This is a problem that was created in 2011. It impacts everything…this [three-phase plan presented at the meeting] creates a way out. Basically, we’re boxed in,” Gearhart said, adding that basically the City needs to be able to “break out of our jail cell.”

“No City has that kind of money, so we needed to seek funding at the federal level,” Mayor Phil Fisher explained. However, no federal funding is available for the project.

In order to continue to meet MDEQ criteria at the City’s present wastewater discharge rate, continued upgrades at the Lovett Water and Sewer Facility are necessary.

“To deal with this important issue required a short-term and a long-term solution,” said Fisher. “The short-term solution required the expansion of the Lovett Treatment Plant. Planning to expand the Lovett water/sewer plant began in 2016. By 2020, the water sewer/fund had grown enough to pay for the expansion of the Lovett Treatment Plant (est. cost $5,500,000) without a need to raise sewer rates. This expansion will take place over the next two budget years, and FY22 budget allocates $2,750,000 for that purpose. The balance will be paid from the water/sewer fund in FY23.”

With this improvement to the plant, MDEQ granted a new deadline of 2030 to complete the new facility and discharge into the Big Black River.

Also added to the FY21-22 budget is $72,000 to hire a lobbyist to represent Clinton in front of Congress regarding the Big Black Regional Sewer Project.

“Congress is the only source for such a large amount of money, and earmarks are back,” Fisher said. “We need someone that knows where to go and follow up on a consistent basis with the right people in Washington, D.C.”

However, cost is just the beginning of the total project, and there’s no guarantee the City will get the funds. Since cities all over the United States are facing similar infrastructure issues, the competition for funds is intense, Fisher explained.

“We want to give a brief overview of a journey that we started on in 2011,” Gearhart said. At that time, the City was approached by an industry that had a pretty significant wastewater need, which is a similar request the City received in 2015, when Continental Tire was looking for a location in Clinton.

WGK then approached MDEQ to find out what could be done to get approval to discharge additional wastewater into Baker’s Creek, and MDEQ responded that they would not grant approval for additional discharge into Baker’s Creek.

At that point, WGK and the City worked to find out what could be done for the City to meet the wastewater requirements and allow the new business to locate in Clinton. Gearhart explained that the process for MDEQ to grant a treatment permit to a City requires that MDEQ set the unique treatment standards for a wastewater plant in a Discharge Permit.

Gearhart said that all streams near Clinton dry up frequently, so the discharge from Clinton plants often is the only flow in the streams. Without dilution in the streams, the Discharge Permit limits are the most stringent, and the mass of discharge can be effectively capped, which is the situation in Clinton. The more stringent the limits, the more expensive it is to build and operate a plant. Gearhart explained that the Total Mass Daily Load, or TMDL, involves evaluating the discharge; MDEQ evaluates a stream and establishes the total mass of organic matter, nitrogen and phosphorus that can be discharged in the stream.

The Environmental Protection Agency reviews each permit granted, and permits have to be renewed every five years.

In the City, the water/sewer treatment plans have already had original permit limits restricted, which means that, despite intensive treatment to the discharge flow, the discharge into the streams and creeks is not adequate when many of the creeks and streams are dry or have very limited water flow.

“Some of the plants that we have are thirty years old,” Gearhart explained, adding that the plants were not designed to handle additional discharge flow. This problem is not unique to Clinton; other facilities that have capped mass TMDL include Raymond, Bolton, Clinton Southside, West View Subdivision and Raymond East, with seven other locations already at the TMDL cap maximum.

The problem developed over years, and the solution will be split into three phases over a ten-year period. The plan is dependent on federal funding and likely means rate increases for Clintonians. The cost to citizens will depend upon the amount of funds the City can get from the Federal government and/or other sources. To date, despite considerable funds dedicated to the expansion of the Lovett Wastewater Treatment Facility, no costs have yet been passed on to citizens.



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