Council hears review of proposed changes to wastewater Pretreatment Program

A resolution for wastewater Pretreatment Program modifications was tabled until the next meeting of the Nevada City Council in order to allow for a study session in which the council will familiarize themselves with the intricacies of the proposed modifications.

Engineer Kim Cole, KimHEC, presented a slide show to council Tuesday evening explaining the wastewater Pretreatment Program, the types of discharges and city responsibilities. She also discussed the proposed changes to the program and provided a written overview of the proposed updates.

In a separate interview, Alliance Water Resources Local Manager Dan Scherer explained, “Pretreatment is a process of regulating your industrial users.” He says Nevada currently has three industrial users in town, under permit, who have limits that must be met on their wastewater discharge. “We monitor those limits. We cross-check them and we take samples and send them to the lab.” Scherer says all Nevada industries are well within their limit.

“We only changed one or two of the limits and we have actually deleted a couple of them because there were non-detectable amounts of those in their discharge,” he continued. “There are several components to the Pretreatment Program establishing local limits and an enforcement plan in place to enforce these limits. If an industry doesn’t meet their discharge criteria then we have a progressive enforcement process to assure they stay within their limits. The new Pretreatment Program is pretty much the same, we just added components to the enforcement program and the minor changes we made to the existing limits.”

Scherer went on to explain that “the Pretreatment Program is a component of the WWTP’s operating permit which needs to be in place as part of the permit renewal process which is currently underway.”

“The resolution that was tabled Tuesday evening is one of the stepping stones toward the public notice stage of the MDNR approval process of the Pretreatment Program. The governing board must support the program prior to reaching the public notice stage.”

Once the pretreatment modification gets the okay from council, it will go on public notice for 30 days. “Once that 30 days is expired, any comments will be reviewed to see if any changes need to be made.” Once the public notice process is complete and the program is approved by MDNR, “it will come back to council for approval as an ordinance. Once approved it will be added into the city code.”

“This change is not that big of a deal, the bigger deal is the actual wastewater treatment plant operating permit. They are two separate animals.” The wastewater treatment plant operation permit will be covered in the Saturday edition of the Nevada Daily Mail.

The decision to have a study session came after Mayor Pro-tem Carol Gallagher expressed concern that the language of the resolution states the council had reviewed the proposed modifications rather than received an overview from the expert.

Council, City Attorney William McCaffree and City Superintendent JD Kehrman discussed the issue and although the technical staff and engineers have reviewed the standards, the council will have a study session rather than amend the language in the resolution or delegate the review to the experts.

McCaffree likened this to trying to learn Greek in three days. He stated that Cole is one of the few engineers in Missouri with this level of expertise, but that the council should “feel comfortable with it. You should review it, but you are going to find that we are going to have to rely on experts in this field the same as you do with a legal problem – or here, an engineering problem.” He also emphasized that in a city government, no one should feel as though something is getting crammed through and that all should feel comfortable with the information presented.