Public Works gives update on much needed wastewater treatment plant upgrade

Ethan Hoagland

Sweet Home Public Works Director Greg Springman is preparing to apply for a loan. It’s a loan he believes the city will be approved for. If that happens, the loan will cover about 80% of the cost of upgrading the city’s wastewater treatment plant.

“This is great news,” Springman said. “It means we can actually start building this plant.” The loan money comes from the Environmental Protection Agency, through a program known as the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act, or WIFIA.

Springman estimates the new treatment plant will cost about $60 million. To make up the remaining 20% that WIFIA can’t cover, Springman said the city is working to secure about $7 million more in grant funding.

“We also raised the rates a couple months back,” Springman said, referring to the increase approved by the city council at the end of September. “We’re starting to collect on that.”

As the quest for funding continues, the focus sharpens on other parts of the upgrade.

“The plant finished designs in July of 2023,” Springman said. “Everything inside the fence line was completed with design.”

Meanwhile, Public Works is in the process of securing permits by conducting environmental assessments through the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA.

“We’re gonna be actually putting a larger outfall into the creek,” Springman said, clarifying that the process with NEPA started a couple months ago, and it usually takes 135 days to complete. “They have to determine with the upsize of this plant, if there’s going to be an adverse effect on the river.”

Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality has long been nudging the city to upgrade the wastewater plant. As The New Era reported in March of this year, DEQ issued a fine of more than $22,000 to Sweet Home for 125 violations of Oregon water-quality law, which Springman at the time described as “fair.”

At the end of November, DEQ reviewed Sweet Home’s plans for upgrading the plant and approved them.

“So DEQ now likes our plan,” Springman said. That leaves federal permitting and the financing. If the moving parts go according to plan, Springman said, Public Works could be submitting construction documents in early 2024, picking a contractor soon after, then breaking ground “at the beginning of summer.” From there, construction will take about three years to complete, according to Springman.

On top of the plant’s age, which dates back to 1947, capacity has become one of the greater challenges faced by Public Works. As Springman pointed out, the plant was built to handle a town of about 3,800 people. Sweet Home’s population is now nearly triple that amount. Springman said the town usually puts about a million gallons of water through the wastewater treatment plant on a given day, which it can handle, but with little to no wiggle room. For example, heavy rains can overwhelm the town’s pipes, sending more than seven million gallons through the plant beyond its capacity, according to Springman.

“The new plant will be able to take in 12.4 million [gallons],” he said. Sweet Home community members received two recent reminders of the current plant’s fragility, when an atmospheric river dumped sheets of rain on the city, causing a couple sewage overflows into Ames Creek and on into the South Santiam River. The first overflow started on Dec. 3, and finished the next morning. Another overflow happened the morning of Dec. 10. Signs posted by the river alerted citizens to the possible presence of bacteria in the water as a result of the overflows.

“That is one of the things we’re making go away with the new plant,” Springman said.

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