Sewer woes hurt economy

By Damian Gessel
The Daily Item

May 03, 2008 10:59 pm

— MIFFLINBURG -- Mifflinburg developer John Griffith stands in the midst of 10 acres of prime real estate and stares at the horizon, where a tree line marks the end of his land.
Right off Route 45 in Mifflinburg, his plot is a scenic tract both quaintly rural and close enough to the pulse of town for commuters and businesses. With a rock and a decent throw, you could hit Mifflinburg Area School District property at the western-most edge of Griffith's land.
"You don't even know how much I have invested in this," he says, offering no number.
Close your eyes against the fields of deep green grass and dandelions and it's easy to construct tax revenue-generating townhouses in your imagination.
Griffith has the interest -- he's fielded both commercial and residential offers for the property. He has the desire to sell. He has more than 20 years of experience and a portfolio of successful projects under his belt, not to mention a reputation for boosting the local economy.
What he doesn't have? Permission to connect to Mifflinburg's overloaded sewage system.
Griffith can do all the building he wants on his 10-acre site, but none of it would do him any good -- he can't even install a toilet.
"It's crazy," he says.
Developers across the Susquehanna Valley are being stymied by crumbling sewer infrastructures. The state Department of Environmental Protection has slapped Selinsgrove, Northumberland, Shamokin, New Berlin, Kreamer and a half-dozen other local municipalities with sewer-connection prohibitions.
There's some give-and-take with DEP -- if a municipality shows the state it's taking steps to correct a faulty system, DEP may give municipalities a few equivalent dwelling units (residences or businesses with flows equal to 400 gallons per day, according to the Pennsylvania Code).
If municipalities turn in a comprehensive, corrective action plan, they may receive some connections to tide over hungry developers. Facilities for the public good, like schools and hospitals, are exempt from connection bans.
But when the rubber meets the road -- and it has in Mifflinburg -- a connection prohibition means only one thing: Fix whatever is ailing your sewage infrastructure or face a stagnant local economy.
Here's the sobering fact: Right now, you can't build a home or a new business in the boroughs of Mifflinburg, Selinsgrove or Shamokin Dam; or Penn or Monroe townships in Snyder County; or Valley Township in Montour County, and many other places in the four-county region.
More specifically, you can build a home or business if a municipality issues you a building permit (unlikely under a sewer connection prohibition, according to Griffith), but you can't allow people to live or work in it without sewer and water.
"The local economy is really going to suffer because of this situation," Griffith says.
The math of decay
Sewage treatment plants, just like anything else, get old. When they get old, they start to crumble. When they start to crumble, they malfunction.
And when they malfunction, DEP steps in.
Mifflinburg has something called an inflow infiltration problem, DEP spokesman Dan Spadoni said. It means, quite simply, that too much water is getting into Mifflinburg's treatment plant. When heavy rains come, people's sewers back up. It's a problem DEP documented in 2005, at which time Mifflinburg borough officials set a plan in motion to upgrade their sewage treatment plant.
The set of circumstances that followed may seem unique, but municipalities across the Valley and the state at large are experiencing similar difficulties.
After nearly three years of routine red tape and back-and-forthing, Mifflinburg secured a $1.1 million state grant and a $7.2 million low-interest loan. It reached its original $8.3 million estimate for the project, and by all accounts was ready to take care of business.
But when Mifflinburg's engineer -- Jason Wert, of State College-based HRG -- reviewed the latest numbers, adjusted for inflation, he was stunned. In just three years, the cost of Mifflinburg's sewage treatment plant renovation has leaped from $8.3 million to $15 million -- a staggering 81 percent increase.
"I've built over $200 million in projects," Wert said, "and this one floored us."
Rising fuel prices, demand for building materials in China and other developing countries and a down market had combined to lift cement, steel, paint and aluminium prices into the stratosphere. In fact, Wert said, they've changed the paradigm of planning construction projects.
"You generally expect construction prices to increase 3 percent per year," Wert said. "Now they're averaging closer to 10 percent per year."
Mifflinburg Mayor Dave Gutelius, along with just about everyone else in town, is crossing his fingers that the state will grant Mifflinburg the extra $6.7 million it needs to upgrade its sewage treatment plant. Even if Mifflinburg gets the money it needs, the project will take until 2010 to finish.
According to Wert, Mifflinburg's sewer system was built mostly in the 1950s. Most other sewer systems in the state, he said, were built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, meaning Mifflinburg may be at the forefront of what soon could be a host of towns and cities battling decaying sewer systems.
And, unfortunately, they could also be on the front lines of being hit with a catch-22: the struggling national economy has made fixing infrastructure cost much more, but local economies will struggle mightily until infrastructure is up to snuff.
"We're not the only borough in Pennsylvania in this predicament," Gutelius said. "It's coming, and some of the small boroughs will never survive it. It's going to eat them apart."
Check, please
So who's going to pay for all these mandated infrastructure upgrades? Who's opening their wallet to fix the state's decaying sewer systems? Who's money will be spent to clean up sewage for the Chesapeake Bay program?
The short answer: You.
"It's ultimately costing the rate payers," Wert said.
In Mifflinburg, for instance, rates are expected to jump from $37 per month to around $50 a month to pay for sewage treatment plant renovations, some of which include following DEP's mandated Chesapeake Bay restrictions.
"A lot of communities are going to see their water and sewer rates skyrocket if they haven't already," said Dave Hall, president of the Greater Susquehanna Valley Chamber of Commerce.
Wert and others have said it's hard to point the finger specifically at the Chesapeake Bay program, which is an initiative to help rid sewage of ecosystem-damaging nitrogen and phosphorus. Pennsylvania is the largest bay polluter. And many sewer infrastructures are simply aging. But dozens of local communities are being forced to devote more and more resources toward sewage treatment.
At the Eastern Snyder County Regional Authority, which handles sewage for Selinsgrove and Shamokin Dam, and Monroe and Penn townships, resources were recently allocated to cut back on nitrogen and phosphorus to comply with the Chesapeake Bay program.
ESCRA Manager John Abromitis said, though, that his facility is now overloaded with organic waste. On April 15, DEP slammed the facility with a prohibition against new connections. Like Mifflinburg, the areas ESCRA serves will have to wait to build new houses or businesses.
"(The ban) is pretty complete and all-encompassing," Abromitis said. "Unless a business had purchased the lot and secured a sewer permit ... before April 15, 2008, they're out of luck for at least the short term.
"And we hope it is the short term."
John Griffith, the Mifflinburg developer who can't develop because of sewage-connection prohibitions, has a simple take on his community's predicament. He, like developers across much of the Valley, can't understand how things got to this point.
"I don't know what's going to happen now," he said, slipping off his sunglasses.
n E-mail comments to dgessel@dailyitem.com.

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