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Wastewater treatment plant may be moved upBy Barbara Brown The North Branch City Council is expected to decide at its Jan. 14 meeting if it wants to move up expansion of the cityís wastewater treatment plant or hold out for possible loan money. Problems with the treatment plant are growing. The storage tanks used to hold sludge leftover from the treatment process are filling up and residential growth in the city has the plant strained to keep up with demand. The treatment plant is expected to reach capacity within the next four years, said Costa Dimitracopoulous, an engineer with WSB Associates of Minneapolis. Dimitracopoulous, who contracts with the city for engineering work, said his firm was working on four build-out scenarios for expanding the treatment facility. One is to not expand if the city has no growth at all, another is to allow the cityís population to increase only to the levels the plant can handle now, a third is to increase the treatment levels slightly and the last is to increase those levels even more to allow for more growth in the city. Dimitracopoulous told the council that it had two choices to fund the project. The city can get on a waiting list for loan money or work out its own funding. He said the council could find a way to fund the improved wastewater treatment plant using city funds and have the project completed within two years or wait for low-interest loan money from the state. Waiting for the loan money would add about one year onto the process, said Dimitracopoulous. He said that delay is because the agency that offers the loan money must approve of the design and it receives many requests for funding each year. To be eligible for the loan money, the cityís application also would have to include more detailed work than has been completed so far, Dimitracopoulous said. He said if the city funds the project itself, a current feasibility study could be nixed and a more solid design could be created. Then the city could engineer and fund the project as it goes along. No cost estimates on the project are ready yet, Dimitracopoulous said. He said his group is waiting for effluency limits from state agenies. Those limits would determine the size and function of the treatment plant, thereby changing the cost. ©ECM Post Review |