By Paul Alleva, The Chronicle, 4/25/2002
No discussion of regionalization in Lewis County would be complete without considering the Twin Cities' wastewater treatment plants.
Each city needs a new plant. Centralia proposed to Chehalis they work as partners to build and operate a regional plant the two cities would share. Chehalis officials replied, ''The numbers don't add up,'' and Centralia perceived in its southern neighbor an unwillingness to cooperate.
The idea that both cities might share a wastewater treatment plant was proposed before Centralia hired J.D. Fouts as city manager.
''I came on board in July of 2000,'' Fouts said. When the Centralia City Council realized Chehalis was unwilling to share one plant, Centralia decided to drop the idea and move forward with building its own plant, he said. He still believes in a regional plant.
''It appears to me one treatment plant over 40 or 50 years would be more cost-effective,'' Fouts said. ''Some of the costs in the future are unknown. It can be challenging to meet those costs. Having two plants would make it more challenging.''
He said if the cities' circumstances were reversed, if Chehalis had begun the preliminary work for its proposed plant before Centralia, Centralia would have wanted to explore the possibility of partnering with Chehalis.
''If Chehalis was building a wastewater treatment plant, we would want to look at it to see if it's cost-effective for us to use it,'' Fouts said.
Centralia decided to build the plant without Chehalis as a partner rather than continue trying to persuade its southern neighbor to reconsider, Fouts said, because getting the funds the city needed required acting quickly.
''We had a better chance of getting the funds then,'' he said. ''It would have been tough to get them later. I think it was a wise decision to move forward.''
When asked why the city of Chehalis declined to share a regional wastewater treatment plant with Centralia, Chehalis Mayor Bob Spahr said a regional plant makes no financial sense.
''We can build a plant for less money than it would cost to build the line'' needed to pump the wastewater to a regional plant, Spahr said, because a regional plant cannot be built between the Twin Cities, where pumping costs would be minimized.
The Washington Department of Ecology prohibits the building of a wastewater treatment plant in certain areas, according to Centralia City Light Director Dick Southworth.
''You can't build on wetlands, you can't build on the 100-year flood plain,'' Southworth said. ''You can't build a plant within 5,000 feet of a propeller-service airfield and within 10,000 feet of a jet-service airfield.''
All three of the locations Centralia considered between the two cities fell into one of those categories, he said, ''and when we looked for other locations we might have overlooked, we found none.''
A joint study written in August of 1999 by Gibbs & Olson, an engineering consulting firm hired by Chehalis, and CH2M Hill, the firm hired by Centralia, concluded a regional plant would cost Chehalis a little more than $50 million, whereas building and pumping its wastewater to its own plant would cost the city a bit less than $39 million.
And since that study was published, Chehalis' cost estimate of using a regional plant has gone up, and the cost estimate of building and using its own new plant has come down.
But the actual cost of Centralia's new plant has also come down.
After the 1999 joint study was completed, Centralia changed the site of its proposed regional plant from Galvin, which is seven miles north of the Chehalis pump station, to the Flying T Ranch off Goodrich Road, which is about a mile farther north. Chehalis' Wastewater Superintendent Patrick Wiltzius estimated it would cost about $5 million more to pump the city's wastewater to the Flying T Ranch, so the city's total cost for a regional plant would be about $55 million.
In a memo Wiltzius sent to Chehalis' Public Works Director Jim Nichols in September, Wiltzius said the DOE would no longer require the city to pump its wastewater to a discharge point below the mouth of the Skookumchuck River because the DOE approved another option. The city could discharge its treated wastewater into a grove of poplar trees within a couple of miles of its proposed new plant. Wiltzius estimated the cost of building a separate plant and discharging into the trees at about $30 million.
Chehalis would thus save roughly $25 million by building its own plant, according to Nichols, Wiltzius and Spahr.
Centralia has also seen a decrease in the cost of its project. Its engineer's estimate for building its new plant was $22 million; the bid the city recently awarded Pease & Sons was for a little less than $17 million.
There are other reasons Chehalis opposes a regional treatment plant.
''Wastewater that's shipped up north will stay there,'' said Spahr. ''It won't come back to Chehalis. That wastewater could be an asset someday. It can be used for industrial purposes: for cooling industrial equipment, as boiler water, for irrigation.''
Wiltzius said California is reusing its treated wastewater.
''They're the ones who wrote the book on it,'' he said. Yelm is also using treated wastewater, he added, to wash buses, irrigate large properties, and for water parks.
''What's a problem for us today might be a gold mine tomorrow,'' Spahr said.
Another cost of using a regional plant, Nichols said, is the city's loss of the money it has already spent preparing to build its own new plant.
''If we went regional now,'' he said, ''we would be throwing away hundreds of thousands of dollars of work.''
''We have spent in excess of $500,000 to date, over five years, developing the general sewer plan and the facilities plan and doing the environmental work involved in planning for a new plant,'' said Wiltzius.
Besides, Nichols said, ''we are already a regionalized system. If we had turf issues, we would not be involved with Napavine and with Lewis County Sewer District No. 1.''
When asked about the idea Centralia proposed two weeks ago as an interim solution, that of using the two cities' existing plants to treat the high wet-weather flows and using the new plant at the Flying T Ranch to treat the low summer flows, Spahr and Campbell said if they decided not to build a new plant of their own, they could not continue to use their existing plant as is.
''We'd have to upgrade the existing plant and floodproof it if we wanted to keep it,'' said Chehalis City Manager Dave Campbell.
Spahr said Chehalis has too little time to get bogged down in discussions of alternatives.
''We've got eight years to build a monumental project,'' he said. ''We can't spend seven years playing with numbers and then build it in a year.''
Fouts said he feels frustrated because it appears to him that Centralia is doing all the proposing, and all Chehalis is doing is rejecting each proposal.
''We're coming up with ideas,'' he said. ''They're not coming back with their own ideas. I don't feel that reciprocating response.''
Spahr denied he is being bullheaded to be difficult.
''The decisions we make are based on facts,'' he said. ''My job is to make decisions based on the information we have on hand. It has nothing to do with rivalry,'' he said.
When The Chronicle repeated Spahr's comments to the Centralia city manager, Fouts smiled. ''No comment,'' he said.
Centralia Mayor Tim Browning sees the situation from a different perspective.
''This isn't just about Centralia and Chehalis,'' he said. ''We ought to have a 50-year plan for the whole county. I don't want to fight over $3 here or $4 there for a wastewater treatment plant. We need to make a countywide commitment to determine how to use our resources at the least expense to our constituents.''
---
Paul Alleva covers municipal government and public issues for The Chronicle. He may be reached by e-mail at palleva@chronline.com or by calling 807-8239.
This page created and maintained by Chehalis River Council
Send comments or questions to the: Chehalis River Council