City gets $600,000 grant

A planned sewage bill hike for the city’s residents will likely be smaller after a grant was awarded for work on Portland’s wastewater system.
The City of Portland was awarded $600,000 Thursday from the Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs (OCRA) to help with improvements to the city’s wastewater treatment plant.
The grant money is part of more than $7 million awarded to 13 Indiana communities as a part of OCRA’s Wastewater Drinking Water Program.
The announcement comes after city officials submitted an application for the grant at the Oct. 14 Portland City Council meeting. The money will be used for the $3.3-million project to construct two new center-feed final clarifiers and make other changes to the plant. The remaining $2.7 million will come in the form of a loan from the State Revolving Fund.
City officials said they will have to raise sewage bills in the future to help pay off the loan. But Portland Mayor Randy Geesaman and wastewater superintendent Bob Brelsford both said the grant money will help reduce the impact of the new construction on costs for customers. Geesaman estimated that for a house that uses about 5,000 gallons of water a month, he expects the sewer bill will rise by about $4 to $5 per month in order to pay for the remaining $2.7 million of the project.
The construction of the clarifiers is part of a larger plan to bring the city’s wastewater system up to state and federal standards. In June 2014, the city was fined $6,000 by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) for having high ammonia levels in water discharged into the Salamonie River.
IDEM mandates that the city complete its first phase of improvements by 2018.
The work is being planned by Jones & Henry Engineering of Fort Wayne. Engineer Brian Houghton said the phase one improvements will include installing two new 73-foot center-feed clarifiers, expanding the size of the aeration tank and taking the current trickling filters out of service.
Houghton explained that the current clarifiers are an older, outdated design.
“The old final tanks do not work well, it was an unusual design, something that was new and innovative 30 to 40 years ago,” Houghton said.
He also said the trickling filters, which do the same job as the aeration tanks by introducing microorganisms into the water to decompose waste and remove ammonia, need to be taken offline because they are inefficient in the winter.
“Trickling filters do a really good job at removing organics and solids from the wastewater, except in cold weather,” Houghton said.
Brelsford added that once phase one is complete, the city’s wastewater plant will be able to handle a larger volume of sewage and also ensure that it doesn’t breach IDEM rules in the future.
“By increasing our volume, that should decrease the amount of CSO (combined sewer operation) discharges, where we can take more in at the plant,” Brelsford said.
Currently, the plant can handle about 3.2 million gallons of wastewater per day.
During high periods of rain, wastewater is discharged from the city’s combined sewers, which carry drainage and sewage in one line, into the Salamonie River.
Once phase one construction is complete, the city’s wastewater plant will be able to handle about 4.7 million gallons of wastewater per day.
A second phase of construction is mandated by IDEM to be completed by 2023. It will add a new oxidation ditch and make other improvements to the plant, in order to fulfill all of IDEM’s regulations.