By Justin Jaech
The Times 

City holds workshop meeting on wastewater plant plan

 


DAYTON – The Dayton City Council held a work session meeting at 9 a.m. on Wednesday, April 27, 2022, in person and on Zoom. All councilmembers were present; Laura Aukerman, Misty Yost, Teeny McMunn, Dain Nysoe, Kyle Anderson, and Tyler (Tiger) Dieu were present in-person, as was Mayor Zac Weatherford. The purpose of the meeting was for the council and City to work on a strategy to move forward on the City’s sewage treatment plant.

Weatherford wanted to emphasize that the project was not dead after the council’s vote not to purchase the recommended land to move forward. The mayor said he wants the Public Works Committee to make recommendations to the rest of the council. The Public Works Committee is chaired by Laura Aukerman and includes members Dain Nysoe and Misty Yost.

Several property options were briefly discussed; however, the council must first decide whether it wants to proceed with the proposed low slope flood plain design. This design is favored by environmental groups and agencies and is perhaps the most economical and easiest to fund option. Past mayors and city councils for Dayton have worked with government agencies and engineers to develop the current plan, approving the money spent and funds raised.

Councilmember Dieu said, “I’m not saying that this is a terrible project, but what are our other options? If we bring AHBL (a Seattle engineering firm, with offices in Spokane, Tricities, Tacoma) in, we can see how much it’s going to cost for them to be involved. And how much that cost would be into it, to say, for them to take over this portion because they’re not just the planning, they’re pretty big. I’ve looked at the whole thing that we voted on, so and with the quarry, what else can they do for us with this project? Why aren’t they the lead entity? Why aren’t they the one going through, and we can start out with going in the right direction, of ok, the money that we’ve used and spent? People are curious where this $200,000 went. Now that’s a pretty big question.”

Weatherford answered, “It went into all the due diligence that we’ve been performing the last couple of years.”

Dieu asked if the money went to Anderson Perry. Weatherford answered that some of the money had gone to the engineering firm.

Jake Hollopeter, an engineer, and VP at Anderson Perry explained that the money the firm received paid for on-site drilling, installation of groundwater equipment, geotechnical test kits, wetland assessments and an archaeological investigation. Funds also covered the numerous meetings with city officials, meetings with the Department of Ecology and the Blue Mountain Land Trust.

Department of Ecology (DOE) representative, Cynthia Hall, said potential treatment options had been explored since 2007. The design the city is pursuing was initially proposed by the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reserve (CTUIR) at a meeting in April 2019. This plan allows water to be replaced into the Touchet River with legal discharge allowed year round.

Hall wanted to give perspective that this was a project that has taken a long time to come to fruition. She reiterated that the DOE would support this project in any way it can. Some money spent was to assure the plan was feasible and would meet ecological requirements before the City purchased property for the treatment plant.

Weatherford said much of the $200,000 was spent identifying and confirming suitability of the proposed land parcels which the new council voted not to purchase at its last meeting. He said repeating the process to identify alternative properties would incur the same cost already spent.

Before deciding on the low slope flood plain design, Weatherford said other options including land application designs using circular irrigation systems were investigated by the city and past councils. This involves irrigating not for human consumption crops, such as alfalfa, and require the purchase of a much larger area of land.

Council member Anderson said farmers could make more money selling crops unfit for human consumption because grass crops are more valuable than wheat per acre of land. He also argued that the city did not have to own the land that would be irrigated using the wastewater and that an agreement would be all that was needed.

Department of Ecology representitive Hall offered an example of a simlar size town, Deer Park, Wash. Deer Park is using an irrigation system for its wastewater treatment, storing effluent year round in a primary storage lagoon of a couple of acres, according to Hall.

The waste is pumped a mile to three storage ponds and then used to irrigate 160 acres of afalfa. The city pays for the fertilizer and pays the farmer for the crop, so the operation and maintenance cost is high, said Hall.

She said the city of Deer Park would porobably be happy to give councilmembers a tour of their facility and discuss what is involved.

After the meeting, The Times reached out to the WSU Columbia County Extension office in Dayton and spoke with Stephen VanVleet about crop value. He said the more profitable crops are winter wheat and other human consumption crops, including legumes, compared to grass crops. Of the grass crops, alfalfa and timothy hay are the more profitable, though not compared to winter wheat and other dry crops.

Jake Hollopeter, Vice President at Anderson Perry, pointed out that to use the irrigation solution, the city would have to either build two wastewater treatment plants, one for discharging the effluent to cover crops in the summer and another to legally discharge effluent into the river during the winter or build storage lagoons capable of retaining 300,000 gallons of effluent per day, for about six months. Hollopeter also said that about 65 acres of cropland would be required for the irrigation treatment solution.

Cynthia Wall, who spoke for the Department of Ecology, pointed out that grants to support Dayton’s treatment plant from the department’s Office of Columbia River, Walla Walla 2050 Initiative, the Tribes, and the Washington Water Trust would go away if the water was for a consumptive crop. This would squarely put the burden more on the people of Dayton who pay water and sewer bills.

The flood plain design allows for the water to go back into the Touchet River year-round which is of great benefit to the ecology of waterway.

Councilmember McMunn said it looked like the council was “tripping over dollars to pick up dimes.” She said she wants to stay with the low slope flood plain design because changing to an irrigation plan means the whole process would have to be started all over again. She said the City would lose a lot of funding and have increased costs for the project.

“I would like to see it move forward,” said McMunn.

Councilmember Aukerman expressed concern that using the flood plain to discharge wastewater could mean expensive flood insurance for any outbuildings built there. She did not cite data for this conclusion.

Weatherford welcomed councilmembers and the public to examine the information he had available on the project.

Dieu said, “I’m not opposed to these wetlands entirely. I would like to see the AHBL be involved heavily, and maybe they could be the project coordinator and see how much that would be.”

He said he didn’t want to take away from the work the mayor had done, however, he implied AHBL should be brought in as an outside third party.

“I’m not taking away from all your (Weatherford) work in this, where they (AHBL) can come in and be the third party and coordinate with DOE, Cynthia, and maybe even look into other design firms and see if they have any other ideas.

“But we can still move forward and look into these other options and bring this to AHBL. And bring them into the picture and have them have a different set of eyes to show and say, hey, because they don’t live here, they don’t have real skin in the game. No body’s scratching each other’s backs, complete transparency of it all.

“Have them come to every monthly meeting and give us an update on what’s going on along with the Public Works Committee, and as long as no more red flags pop up with these wetlands, I’m not opposed to it. But I also want to make sure we’re not going to, cause either way, people are going to say our taxes are going up because of our decisions. It’s going to happen regardless, and that’s not my fault; it’s not anybody else’s fault here,” said Dieu.

“So, Tiger, are you suggesting that we ignore all the work that Anderson Perry has done with the city over the years?” Nysoe asked.

Dieu said, “I’m not saying we are ignoring any of it, but we need to make sure that we have other ideas too, that we look at other design firms to say what else other ideas have there been. It’s not necessarily that we are going to completely ignore Anderson Perry because you’ve done great work and everything.”

Weatherford said comparing Anderson Perry with AHBL was not an apples-to-apples comparison.

He later said he planned to contact Pat Barker and Bryan Martin to discuss land negotiations and some properties across the road. He also said he would set up a meeting with AHBL and have discussions with the City’s insurer.

The workshop ended after about an hour and thirty-five minutes.

 

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