Fort Smith tries to alter sewer deal

FORT SMITH — City officials will hold a conference call Monday with state and federal officials to request a modification of the consent decree that commits the city to spending more than $480 million over 12 years to make improvements to its sewer system.

City Administrator Carl Geffken and Utilities Director Jerry Walters told city directors they will talk with representatives of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Justice, the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality and the Arkansas attorney general’s office.

The purpose of the meeting, Geffken said, is to lay out the city’s success in meeting the requirements of the consent decree over the past three years and to request modifications to soften the schedule of work the city must perform and the time frame to get it completed.

“I think we will want to go after the rigidity of the consent decree giving our director and staff the engineering latitude to say what is best to achieve what is necessary in a reasonably cost-conscious way,” Geffken told directors during a workshop Friday.

Geffken said he hoped Monday’s meeting will lead to a face-to-face meeting in July or August with regional EPA officials and the environmental quality department where they can begin

negotiating changes to the decree.

Geffken spoke by phone in March with the new EPA District 6 Administrator Ann Idsal about modifying the consent decree and delivered a statement last July to the U.S. House’s Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Affairs and the Subcommittee on the Interior, Energy and the Environment of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

He told city directors Friday that whatever changes ultimately may be made to the decree, it will not absolve the city from making the improvements to its wastewater system the government mandated in the decree that was filed in U.S. District Court in April 2015.

Geffken also complained that the government has given Fort Smith too little time to comply with the consent decree. He said he knew of one city in another part of the country that was under a consent decree that gave it nearly twice the time to pay half the cost of what is in Fort Smith’s consent decree.

The consent decree chiefly requires Fort Smith to eliminate sanitary sewer overflows, both during times of wet weather and dry. The city has made significant progress in eliminating the wet-weather overflows, Walters said, and the main issue now seems to be overflows that occur during dry weather.

Those overflows, unlike rain events that cause the wet weather overflows, are caused mostly in residential areas and some industrial areas because of pipes clogged with fats, oils and grease, he said.

Fort Smith residents are receiving a consent decree progress report with their utility bills this month, Walters said. Among the projects listed for this year are those for which customers will bear the cost of repair. They are implementation of a Fats, Oils, Grease [FOG] testing and elimination program, root control program, sewer cleaning program and a private service line defect remediation program.

Walters said he would like to switch the city’s focus to fixing dry weather overflows and wants the government’s permission to switch.

“We think that we have a fairly good plan that they will accept to allow us to start concentrating on that area,” he said.

If the city gets permission to modify the decree, he said, his staff and consultants will look at delaying work that does not contribute directly to the elimination of overflows in order to be cost effective and efficient.

“It’s not easy to save money,” he said.

The consent decree also requires the city to install more lift stations; repair and replace miles of aging pipe; conduct condition assessments of 50 miles of pipe each year; set up maintenance, management, capacity and operations programs; and initiate an information management system and an overflow reporting and response program.

So far, Geffken said, the city has spent about $100 million on consent decree-required improvements that were paid for by steep sewer rate increases for Fort Smith customers.

Geffken said the city also performed about $220 million worth of improvements in the years before entering into the consent decree, for which the government did not give Fort Smith credit.

At the same time it is working to satisfy the government’s demands for wastewater system improvements, Fort Smith is spending $100 million to build a new 48-inch water transmission line from its treatment plant in Mountainburg to Fort Smith, another $100 million to expand and upgrade its Massard Wastewater Treatment plant, and millions more to build a pump station and force sewer main from Fort Chaffee to the Massard plant, city directors were told.