Original article published in the Mower County Independent, Thursday, March 7, 2024. Reprinted with permission and gratitude.
By Gretchen Mensink Lovejoy
Spring Valley’s city council heard proposals for upgrades to its wastewater treatment plant during the February regular council meeting. Councilors welcomed Bolton & Menk engineers Drew Weber and Jake Pichelmann to the council chambers to share how the plant might function more efficiently, as it is nearly 40 years old and needs its parts brought up to specifications of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) and other environmental oversight entities.
Pichelmann introduced the topic by citing that “a lot of the infrastructure” of Spring Valley’s underground water services is “70, 80 to 100 years old,” and he compared the maintenance of such to a homeowner who must maintain a home by installing replacement water heaters and furnaces as they wear out. He noted that “there are new limits at the PCA and a compliance schedule to meet new nitrogen limits by 2031, and you’re on the clock.” Spring Valley’s 2021 city council had discussed the matter of rehabilitating the plant, but progress apparently stalled, and the work was not done. Pichelmann related that the MPCA listed that the plant presently does not meet phosphorus processing standards and that “excessive inflow and infiltration (I&I)” were also at risk of overloading the plant’s ability to handle its work when storm water flows in and overtakes its capacity.
The circa-1987 plant has a 20-year facility plan that is meant to set the city up to accommodate population projections for Spring Valley’s needs as the years progress, and the engineers affirmed that the current capacity is “excess capacity” because the plant is “at about 50 percent capacity” at this moment. Councilor Greg Brooks inquired of the engineers, “Are we where we need to be?” They countered that “you’re not building new capacity…you’re meeting nitrogen limits,” meaning that essentially, anything done to the plant will be to bring it to compliance with MPCA and national water standards.
The engineers explained that the funding for the facility upgrades would have three options – the Clean Water Revolving Fund would be a possibility, as would the Point Source Water Fund – and that the options or alternatives were to first do plant-wide rehabilitation and update equipment systems and data acquisition and do site restoration, or to take option two, which would offer process upgrades and a settling basis with more operator control, and option three, which, according to Pichelmann, would be to “do nothing, which is not viable because of new regulations…you are on about a seven-year schedule.” The project would “address a failing system…the goal is to create a watertight system.”
They acknowledged that Spring Valley’s city council has been proactive in maintaining its street infrastructure but has not raised water user rates to those commensurate with neighboring communities’, citing that increased user rates might climb between $70 and $80 per month from $40 but that grants could supplement the cost of any work that drives costs up above $80. Replacement cost of an entire wastewater plant would stand “between $30 million to $35 million,” but the concepts they had in mind were set to address problems without incurring that same expense.
Weber and Pichelmann concluded by sharing the potential timeline, highlighting that submission of grants and preliminary plans should have been completed by the beginning of March, after which the preliminary list of items being improved will be brought forward by June, followed by the final list in October. The exact date of construction would be determined after that, but the ultimate compliance deadline is Jan. 1, 2031. The councilors later approved the wastewater facility plan’s first stages.
Courtesy of the Mower County Independent, 135 E Main St. LeRoy, MN 55951, (507)-324-5325
