Paying the wastewater freight

Published 4:00 am Thursday, January 3, 2013

The city of Bend plans to begin talking with business owners this month about a new program to encourage them to reduce the amount of pollution in the wastewater they send into city sewers.

The program, which is still being designed, will also charge businesses closer to the actual cost for the city to treat higher levels of waste in water discharged by businesses such as hospitals, restaurants, grocery stores, breweries and auto repair shops. Currently, these businesses do not pay more, despite putting more waste into the system.

Bend Business Advocate Carolyn Eagan said city workers will begin visiting businesses later this month to discuss the program the city is developing and answer questions. The city organized a group of business owners and other citizens to make recommendations to the city, and this committee would like the new wastewater program to apply to all businesses, Eagan said. “We really are doing what we can to talk to people ahead of time,” Eagan said.

Eagan said recently that in similar programs across the country, “they really are trying to get at the types of businesses that put more down their drains than a normal household would.”

The city has two goals for a new program, Eagan said. One is to encourage these types of businesses to treat wastewater onsite to remove as much pollution as possible before sending it into the sewer system. Some businesses are already doing this.

Deschutes Brewery removes solids from its wastewater and treats the remaining water to ensure it has the correct pH before releasing it into the city sewer system, said brewery utilities manager Craig Horrell. Ranchers feed the spent grain to cattle, and other solids are hauled away and applied to farm fields.

In August, Deschutes Brewery also began using an automatic system to hold its wastewater during the day and release it into the sewer system during the night and early morning, when demands upon the city wastewater treatment plant are lowest, Horrell said.

“We’ve been working closely with them as we grow,” he said.

Garrett Wales, a partner at 10 Barrel Brewing Co., said the brewery’s new production facility also includes a pre-treatment system. Similar to the Deschutes Brewery system, 10 Barrel’s equipment separates solids and treats wastewater to obtain the correct pH.

Pre-treatment costs money, but “from our perspective, it was just the right thing to do,” Wales said. “We put a lot into the sewer system, use a lot of water and put a lot back in.”

Another purpose of the new city program is for businesses to pay the cost of treating high-strength wastewater they produce, Public Works Director Paul Rheault said at a recent meeting of the advisory committee.

At the same meeting, members of the advisory committee voiced similar concerns.

“What it does look like, from the way we currently have the program set up, is we do have the residences picking up some of the costs,” said Matt Thomas, co-owner of Subaru of Bend and a member of the advisory committee.

The city created an industrial wastewater program in the early 1980s, but it only applied to a handful of businesses that used more than 1,000 cubic feet of water per month when the program was created. The City Council voted to put the existing industrial wastewater program on hold in May 2012, and that moratorium will expire at the end of June.

“There are only 12 businesses, at 15 locations, in the current program that’s been put on hold,” Eagan said.

Before the program was halted, it raised $150,000 annually. Operation of the city sewer system, including wastewater treatment and maintenance of the system, is expected to cost $16 million in the current budget year, which ends June 30, Eagan said. She did not know how much the city spends specifically on sewer operations related to businesses that produce more polluted water, for example treating more polluted water. Finance Director Sonia Andrews wrote in an email Wednesday that the city does not know the cost to collect and treat the dirtier wastewater. Kelly Graham, program manager for industrial pretreatment, said a utility rate consultant working for the city is currently calculating this number.

The advisory group will likely ask the City Council to extend the moratorium on the existing industrial wastewater rates until the end of 2013. Eagan said the group wants to coordinate changes in the rate structure with other potential sewer rate modifications, which the city might seek to pay for sewer system improvements to serve all customers.

Members of the advisory group have suggested a five-tiered system based on how much pollution is in the wastewater a business discharges into the sewer system.

Wales, of 10 Barrel, had wanted to know what the company’s sewer costs would be under the new program as envisioned so far, but Eagan said at a meeting in December that would be difficult. “The difficulty is the variance from one of our 2,900 commercial accounts is so great,” Eagan said.