Brookfield seeks state money for sewer project
BROOKFIELD — New legislation was filed at the end of January asking the state to help fund the installation of a much-needed sewer line at Dean Road and Pocono Road in Brookfield.
State Rep. Stephen Harding is spearheading the effort and hopes to help lessen the financial burden on residents in his hometown.
Connecticut’s Clean Water Fund program offers grants through the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection to help address the state’s wastewater needs.
Brookfield continues to struggle with its
water and sewer lines. The requested grant would help lower the amount that residents along the proposed line would have to pay in assessment fees.
Initial evaluations of the project expected it to cost between $1.5 million and $3 million, with assessments ranging between 8 and 16 percent of the total value of affected properties, according to 2020 WPCA meeting minutes on the subject. A grant would lessen this total cost.
Since most of the properties in the neighborhood are still using older septic systems, the Dean-Pocono Road project would help address important environmental contamination issues alongside basic hygienic concerns. The neighborhood, which was built in the 1950s and ’60s, sits on a low-lying plain bordered by the Still River to the west and the railroad to the north.
The area is made up of 91 land parcels and 85 developed properties, of which about half are in the Still River Flood Plain, according to WPCA meeting minutes on the Dean-Pocono Road project from last October.
The bodies of water — including the Still River and the lake it feeds into, Lake Lillinonah — are “heavily stressed” with high levels of nutrients like phosphorus, according to Nelson Malwitz, chairman of the Brookfield Water Pollution Control Authority. Additional nutrients, and phosphorous specifically, often cause eutrophication, or extensive algae blooms, in nearby bodies of water.
The septic systems have a “long history of issues” and “cannot host a code-compliant septic system by today’s standards,” according to reports from the WPCA.
In a letter from May of last year, Brookfield town sanitarian Paul Avery wrote to the WPCA asking them to provide sanitary sewers to the Dean-Pocono Road area. He wrote, “This neighborhood has been a concern to me since shortly after I arrived in Brookfield in the spring of 2008.”
Avery filed an original recommendation about a decade ago, and followed up again in 2020. In the letter, he writes the “wetlands-type soils and/or soils with high restrictive layers” that lead to poor draining and that can cause a backup in residential raw sewage, among other problems.
“We found high levels of E.coli in the creeks feeding the Still River,” Malwitz said. “The septic systems, even when they’re working properly, still put nutrients into the ground and contribute to pollution in Lillinonah.”
“It’s unsafe and it’s not right,” Malwitz said.
If residents’ septic tanks stop functioning and need to be replaced at some point, Harding said that can also be quite difficult.
In a 2019 survey of the area, the WPCA reported that of the 104 properties in the district, 66 approved or did not dissent to the installation of a sewer line, 12 were unsure, and 26 said they did not want one installed. Of those who were against the sewer line, 21 were worried about the cost.
Harding hopes to get approval for the project by the spring. However, funding is limited and the sewer line issue expands beyond Dean-Pocono Road project.
“It’s everywhere, so when you have communities across the state all trying to tap into a million dollars across the state, it’s not a lot of money to go around,” Harding said of Clean Water Fund grants.
The WPCA continues to work on its Candlewood Peninsula project, which seeks to establish a sewer system and a connection to the Danbury Wastewater Treatment Plant for residents in the Candlewood Peninsula area. Harding was involved in securing the state grants for previous Candlewood Peninsula studies.
Malwitz writes in an email that his organization is asking engineering companies to bid for the rights for both the Dean-Pocono Road project and the Candlewood Peninsula project. For now, it will wait for bids to come in so it can secure grant funds.