LAWTON – For more than two decades the municipal sewage treatment system has been under a mandate to cease unauthorized releases of wastewater. The most recent edict issued by the state Department of Environmental Quality occurred just two months ago – and may cost the City of Lawton more than $850,000.
Mayor Stan Booker signed the “consent order” on April 15, and Scott Thompson, executive director of the DEQ, signed the document on May 10.
The DEQ imposed a consent order on the City of Lawton in 1997 for impermissible discharges of wastewater, a violation of state law and the Oklahoma Administrative Code.
The city was directed to conduct a sanitary sewer evaluation survey and afterward to submit a schedule for rehabilitation of the malfunctioning sewage collection system. The city performed the evaluation and developed a schedule for renovation of the wastewater collection system.
Because of the amount of work involved in the project, the DEQ and the federal Environmental Protection Agency agreed to split the renovation project into three multi-year phases.
DEQ issued another consent order in 2003.
Nevertheless, the City of Lawton has been cited repeatedly by the agency for wastewater violations.
For nearly two years, for example, from Jan. 17, 2010, through Dec. 11, 2012, the city reported 78 incidents of overflows of treated and/or untreated wastewater from the city’s sewage collection and treatment system. Those discharges occurred at myriad locations in town, and several sites had multiple sewage overflows, records show.
The volumes of wastewater ranged from a mere 5 gallons to 759,000 gallons one time and a million gallons on two occasions, ledgers indicate. The overflows were blamed on debris, torrential rain, grease, pump failures, vandalism, tree roots, blockages, structural failures, collapsed lines, and cave-ins.
The latest consent order, dated May 10, 2021, lists 227 violations that occurred at the 44-year-old wastewater treatment plant southeast of town during a 30-month period: from September 2018 through February 2021.
They included multiple violations of limits on fecal coliform, ammonia, E. coli bacteria, biochemical oxygen demand, total residual chlorine, and total suspended solids.
The treatment plant discharges treated effluent at two locations: into Nine Mile Creek, which empties into the Red River, and to the reservoir at Public Service Co.’s Comanche Station power plant east of Lawton, which uses the water to cool its generators. The DEQ report listed 123 violations at the Nine Mile Creek discharge point and 104 at the Comanche Lake discharge site in two and a half years. More than two dozen of those violations occurred during the first two months of this year.
City officials advised the DEQ in March 2020 that they believed the permit limit violations occurred because of mechanical failures of components in the wastewater treatment plant, events occurring maintenance of the facility, overloading of solids in the plant’s treatment units, wastewater collection system infiltration and inflow resulting in overloading of the treatment plant, and “unidentified causes.”
DEQ said the city explained that many of the equipment failures “were the result of regular maintenance being delayed due to absorbing the cost of flood damage in 2016.”
DEQ IMPOSES $628K PENALTY, MANDATES CORRECTIVE ACTIONS
Because of persistent violations of wastewater discharge permit limits at the sewage treatment plant, another consent order was imperative, the DEQ contends.
The consent order compels the City of Lawton to complete an “immediate” corrective action plan by February 1, 2022, and complete construction by November 1, 2024, on an “interim” corrective action plan.
Besides the cash penalty, the City of Lawton agreed to submit an “approvable Supplemental Environmental Project proposal” to the DEQ. Expenditures “reasonably associated” with that project “will be at least $229,125,” the consent decree stipulates.
A frequent critic of City Hall wrote on social media last week that the City Council “hid” the DEQ’s Notice of Violations at the sewage treatment plant from Lawtonians prior to the 2019 CIP election that was held in February 2020.
Not so, Booker said. “We didn’t know the extent of the DEQ penalty associated with the wastewater treatment plant” at that time, he said. “We may have been notified by the DEQ of the consent order, but we didn’t know how much it would cost” until several weeks after the election.
Lawton’s wastewater treatment plant went into service more than four decades ago, in 1977, records reflect. The plant has an average-day sewage treatment capacity of 18 million gallons and a peak-day capacity of 24 mgd, Garver Engineering of Norman reported.
Over the past four decades the WWTP has been through several rounds of rehabilitation and upgrades, records show. Although the treatment plant has been “mostly compliant” throughout its history, “a significant percentage of the operating facilities are nearing the end of their useful life and struggling” to meet Lawton’s sewage treatment demands, Garver wrote.
“It is anticipated that a significant portion of the existing plant cannot be cost-effectively rehabilitated for continued use due to the age and condition of the facilities, as well as documented hydraulic issues and flooding concerns,” Garver wrote in an engineering report. The hydraulic issues and flooding concerns “have been areas of particular focus” by the DEQ consent order, Garver noted.
In part because of the City of Lawton’s excellent financial status, the Oklahoma Water Resources Board approved a $47 million low-interest loan to the Lawton Water Authority on May 18 that will finance an overhaul of the sewage treatment plant.
Garver presented a three-phase replacement of the treatment plant “that will take the City of Lawton to 2070,” said Public Utilities Director Rusty Whisenhunt.
Wynn Construction was awarded a $4,960,000 contract on June 8 to perform immediate repairs; the company was the lowest of three bidders for the job. A notice to proceed was issued on June 21 and the contract calls for the work to be finished within 210 consecutive calendar days. If the contractor exceeds the time limit, liquidated damages of $1,000/day will be imposed.
The design of Phase 1 of the WWTP renovation has begun and will be ready to advertise next July, Whisenhunt said. The Phase 1 project will take approximately two years to construct after the contract is awarded, he said. All three phases of the project will transpire over a period of 12 to 15 years, Whisenhunt said.
30-YEAR LOAN AT BELOW-MARKET INTEREST RATE
The loan from the Water Board will be secured with a lien on the city’s water, sewer and trash collection revenues, and perhaps a mortgage on Lawton’s water and sewer systems, said Joe Freeman, chief of the Water Resources Board’s Financial Assistance Division. The debt will be retired within 30 years, the loan agreement provides.
Because of the OWRB’s AAA bond rating, Lawton’s loan from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund will bear an interest rate of approximately 1.8%.
The City of Lawton has a debt coverage ratio of 5.54, Freeman said. That means the city has five and a half times the amount of cash necessary to meet its long-term debt obligations.
Lawton has four outstanding loans with the Water Board totaling $9.3 million, Freeman related. However, three of those will be paid off “relatively soon,” Jerri Hargis of the OWRB’s Financial Assistance Division said earlier this year.
Two loans of $1 million-plus were secured in 2002 and another of $1 million-plus was secured in 2003, she said. The balances on those loans are $139,956 and $78,461 (both scheduled to pay off in August 2022) and $167,948 (to be paid off in August 2023), Freeman said.
In addition, the City of Lawton received a $12,705,000 loan from the OWRB in 2018; the balance on that loan is $8,951,276, Hargis said in April.
“There will be no increase in utility fees for at least a year,” Mayor Booker said Wednesday. “Currently the debt on the wastewater treatment plant is being paid for with savings from utility notes that are being paid off.”