Estimated price given to Gravette for sewage treatment

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

— Public works director James Boston and Mayor Bill Montgomery reported, at Monday’s city council meeting, that they have given the city of Gravette an estimated price for sewage treatment.

City officials in Decatur and Gravette began considering the possibility of piping Gravette’s sewage to Decatur’s new wastewater treatment plant last month.

Boston and Montgomery said, after considering the costs, they presented Gravette with a price of $2.15 perthousand gallons of sewage treated.

“It’s a very workable figure that will help them out and allow us to treat their waste and recoup our expenses,” Montgomery said.

Because of tighter phosphorus controls, Gravette is under order to build a new wastewater treatment plant. Piping the waste to Decatur would solve problems for both cities.

Most of Decatur’s wastewater is generated by the Simmons Foods chicken processing plant, so when the chicken plant is shut down on the weekend the residential customers don’t generate enough wasteto feed the bacteria that break down the sewage, Boston said.

Since Gravette doesn’t have any industries that use a lot of water, they only generate 8 to 10 percent as much water as Decatur. Their sewage could easily be stored and then treated on a Saturday or Sunday, he said.

“We can treat everything they make in a week in one day on the weekend,” he said.

Boston said Gravette’s engineers had reviewed the figures, and found it would be less expensive to pipe wastewater to Decatur for treatment than to build a new wastewater plant. The proposal was approved at a Gravette committee meeting last week but has yet to be presented to Gravette’s city council, he said.

“They’ve got a long way to go,” Boston said, explaining that they are still in the earliest stages of exploring the feasibility of the project. If Gravette’s city council approves the proposal, they will have to pursue state approval and funding for the project.

“No decisions were made, we just told them we can handle it and this will be the cost,” Montgomery said.

Gravette will want a 20-year contract with Decatur for wastewater treatment, because that will be the length of their bond issue, Montgomery said.

Currently, the Decatur plant is using an average of 53 percent of its capacity, Boston said. Considering Decatur and Gravette’s growth for the next 20 years, the plant would still operating at less than 80 percent of its capacity. State regulations don’t allow wastewater treatment plants to operate at more than 80 percent of their capacity, to give them a margin of error, Boston explained.

Councilwoman Sandy Duncan said a community member had asked her why the city spent so much money on building such a big plant if we weren’t fully using it.

Boston and Montgomery explained several factors for the size of the plant. The chicken processing plant creates most of the sewage producedin the town and when it is shut down on the weekends there is very little sewage flow, Montgomery emphasized.

The state decides how big a plant a city must build, based on projections from past usage, Boston said. When Peterson Farms owned thechicken processing plant, they used a lot more water and produced more wastewater that Simmons Foods currently does, he said.

“That was something we couldn’t project back then when we were calculating those numbers ... Simmons is doing a tremendous job of cleaning up and using less water,” Montgomery said.

There are some days the treatment plant takes in its full capacity because of heavy rainfall, Boston said. The state also considers historic rainfall figures when calculating the size of the plant, he said.

News, Pages 1 on 02/17/2010