TheDay.com - Funding For The Future: "Funding For The Future
By Harold W. Storrs
Published on 7/1/2007
Last January, the Stonington Water Pollution Control Authority delivered a Wastewater Facilities Plan to the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection. That document — a 20-year, townwide master plan for sewer management — represents more than six year's work by professional engineers, authority members and staff, and many interested and involved citizens.
The DEP will soon have reviewed it, stamped it approved with little or no comment, and returned it to the authority. Now what? In the face of increasing need, inflation, rising energy and materials cost, and competition for capital improvement dollars, for wastewater treatment facilities in Stonington and throughout the state to continue improving water quality, there needs to be a stable funding source or a fundamental change in the method of funding water-quality projects.
When it started out, the WPCA had several objectives to keep in mind. Stonington's three treatment plants were built during the 1970s and are showing signs of age. Flows to the Mystic plant began to exceed the plant's capacity in the early 1990s, resulting in a moratorium on new connections until some of the flow could be diverted to another plant in Stonington borough. Any proper master plan would bring the treatment facilities up to present-day standards and be able to respond to existing and future needs without risking another moratorium. And then, what to do with three separate treatment plants? Retain all three, consolidate them into one or two, or build an entirely new plant?..."
