Reliance on state-of-the-art technology can lead to unforeseen costs, and the Eugene Water & Electric Board is paying the price.

EWEB opted for a $300,000 cutting-edge system to manage the wastewater generated at its new operations center. The innovative treatment system, which has been installed at a handful of facilities in Oregon, involves a delicate start-up period and ongoing maintenance, and some owners adapt to it more easily than others. Unanticipated levels of water usage contributed to EWEB’s decision to spend $55,000 to connect its facility’s pipes to Eugene’s conventional sewer system.

Ecological wastewater treatment, which uses microorganisms and living plants to clean wastewater, can drastically reduce water usage. And the innovation is growing in popularity as the technology advances. Both EWEB and the Port of Portland last year installed such living systems.

But while EWEB is still sorting out issues with the “Eco-Machine” at its Roosevelt Operations Center after one year of use, the Port of Portland’s “Living Machine” has been running smoothly, although it too required some tweaking.

“(The Eco-Machine) wasn’t really working as well as we had hoped,” said Lance Robertson, a spokesman for EWEB. “It took us a while to figure out what was preventing it from working as was planned.”

EWEB did not initially connect its operations center to the city’s sewer system, hoping that the Eco-Machine would handle all water treatment on-site. But the utility paid $30,000 to connect to the conventional sewer lines and $25,000 to add necessary system controls, according to Robertson. The center officially hooked up to the city sewer lines on Nov. 1, he said.

, the project’s general contractor/construction manager, also paid a small amount to connect the systems and was responsible for purchasing the meter, according to Robertson.

“The concept has very noble environmental goals,” said Larry Banks, principal at , the firm that designed EWEB’s operations center. “But the owner of the system does need to go in with their eyes open and understand the ongoing maintenance effort that a system like this requires.”

When nearly 300 employees at the Roosevelt Operations Center began moving into the facility in early winter 2010, cold weather prevented the Eco-Machine’s cultures from developing properly. Then, when workers from the facility’s maintenance shops washed their equipment throughout the winter, surges in water use overflowed the system.

“The term eco-machine implies something comes in on a truck and just works as if thousands are built in a factory,” Banks said. “It’s a bit of a misnomer. In hindsight, I wish we had more fully engaged operations and maintenance staff in discussions about maintaining the system during design.”

The Living Machine, a similar system installed at the Port of Portland’s headquarters, also endured a rocky start. The system, featured prominently in the lobby and at the building’s entrance, went into toxic shock after a couple of weeks of use at full occupancy.

The microorganisms that aid the cleaning process can handle only a limited amount of activity at first. When the building became fully operational in May, the system was overwhelmed by waste from 430 employees, and the plants started dying.

Unlike the EWEB facility, the Port of Portland’s headquarters was already hooked up to the city sewer system. When samples indicated that the system wasn’t functioning properly, the port diverted the water into Portland’s sewer system and started feeding the machine powdered milk to reintroduce the productive bacteria.

“It was a good lesson,” said Dan Gilkison, the port’s lead engineer for the headquarters project. “Now we control how much (wastewater) we put into the system at any given time so the machine sees a constant stream, which is what it likes.”

The system was back on pace after approximately two months and has since functioned smoothly, according to Gilkison. The Living Machine helps decrease water usage by approximately 75 percent in comparison to a similar-size office building.

The plants and organisms in EWEB’s Eco-Machine also have started to thrive, according to Robinson, and the system is still being monitored so that its effectiveness can be evaluated.

But some of the challenges both facilities faced can be traced to the fact that they introduced the technology into new buildings, which makes it difficult for designers to accurately predict the waste stream and water flows.

“In a brand new building, you can get surprised during the start-up – and you have to be prepared for that,” said Will Kirksey, a global development officer at , the corporation that provided the system for the port headquarters. “If you have an existing building, you can see what’s coming in so you know how to prepare the system.”

Despite the challenges, people involved with the projects stand behind the technology and expect to see more of these systems installed in the future.

Kirksey cited a Living Machine being developed at the new headquarters for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. The wastewater system will be done in January, but construction crews will still be working on the building’s interior until the summer; by using the restroom in the interim, they will make the Living Machine more robust and better able to handle the transition into full occupancy.

“This is all a part of trying to be more sustainable and trying to do the right thing,” Robinson said. “Oftentimes there are these technical issues that get in the way of that. We’re glad we were able to figure it out and get the thing running.”

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Clackamas County has made an offer to Milwaukie to settle their long-running dispute over sewage treatment rates. Milwaukie has until 5 p.m. Thursday to accept the offer before the dispute goes to arbitration.

Both sides had agreed to attempt reaching agreement with help of a mediator during the month of March. If no settlement was in place by April 1, the framework called for the sides to submit their cases to an arbitration panel.

After an all-day mediation session March 30, the sides continued negotiations, said Kenny Asher, Milwuakie’s community development director. He would not comment on the points of agreement or remaining sticking points.

Both sides have started on the process of selecting arbitrators by the agreed-upon April 15 deadline, even while Clackamas County‘s offer is on the table. If Milwaukie accepts the offer, arbitration would be called off.

Clackamas County runs the Kellogg Creek sewage treatment plant in Milwaukie. When negotiations over sewer rates broke down last summer, the district canceled its contract with Milwaukie.

The sides have battled over outstanding costs, sewage treatment rates and other issues since then.

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For the small coastal communities of Netarts and Oceanside, finding stable ground to build a sewage treatment plant was challenging enough. Then they had to figure out how to get the sewage to a new plant.

The Netarts Oceanside Sanitary District built its treatment plant in 1977 on what turned out to be a sinkhole. “They built it on an old quarry site, and it was never really a stable site,” said Lyle Christensen, natural resource specialist with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

District officials are now seeking contractors to bid on a project to build a new treatment plant. The total project cost is estimated at around $21 million, with construction around $17 million.

Engineers considered two sites northeast of Oceanside for the new treatment plant before selecting the current site, southeast of Oceanside. “We’re along the coast on a hillside,” said Dan Mello, district superintendent.

“There’s no flat land,” he said. “It’s hard to find anything stable and flat.”

The new 9.7-acre site meets those requirements and another, Mello said: unlike the current site, there’s room to grow. The design of the new plant allows it to double in capacity when an expansion is needed.

First, the sewage has to get to the new treatment plant, 3,000 feet away at an elevation gain of 200 feet. Right now, all the pipes lead to the existing plant.

There’s no easy way to reroute those pipes, Mello said. “You would have to redesign our entire collection system,” he said. “It would be cost prohibitive.”

So the project requires drilling through the hillside and building a pump station at the current treatment plant to pump sewage uphill to the new site. Treated water would then be piped downhill to the existing ocean outfall.

Although the district has fewer than 1,500 customers, tourists flood the area in the summer, causing a spike in demand. “In the summer and holidays, people come in to mainly second and third homes,” Mello said. “The hotels get full. Our flows can triple.”

Building a system that can handle those peaks can be expensive. District officials had planned to build the new plant in phases to spread out the cost.

They caught a break last year. “We’ve been working on this treatment plant and upgrading all the pump stations, planning and building since 2001,” Mello said. “Then we happened to luck out on stimulus money.”

The federal stimulus package had given the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s rural development program in Oregon more money to work with, said Sam Goldstein, community programs director for Oregon. The USDA awarded Netarts Oceanside a roughly $9 million grant and a roughly $12 million loan for the project.

“They received as much money in their single package as is allocated to us in a typical year,” Goldstein said.

The USDA considers a community’s size, income level and whether there are potential health issues the project will address. In a tiny district such as Netarts Oceanside, relatively few customers have to shoulder the large cost of a new treatment plant.

“When you’re small, it’s hard to spread the debt service around,” Goldstein said. “They had a fairly desperate need for assistance.”

The district also earned points from the USDA for having an agreement in place with the state DEQ to replace the plant. Although the plant meets permit requirements, its age and the site’s quirky geology pose frequent challenges, Christensen said.

A buried stream erodes rock used to backfill the quarry, undermining the plant, he said. “They’ve had issues with the clarifiers being twisted because the ground was settling,” he said.

“They did what they could.”

With the grant money, the district can now take on the project in one phase, Mello said. The plant is scheduled for completion in October 2011. Earlier plans called for completion in 2012 or 2013.

The new plant will use a similar treatment process as the existing plant, but with newer sequential batch reactor technology to better handle fluctuations in flow, Mello said. It’s designed to last two decades.

Of course, the current plant has held up for 33 years. “They’re all designed for a 20-year life,” he said. “But with maintenance and upkeep, we can extend that.”

The prebid meeting for the project is March 11 at 10 a.m. at the Netarts Fire Hall. Bidding opens on April 1.

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After a detour through the state Capitol, the long-running feud between Milwaukie and Clackamas County over sewage treatment rates will go to mediation next month. The agreement to negotiate comes shortly before a deadline that would have forced Milwaukie officials to find another way to treat the city’s sewage.

Clackamas County Service District No. 1 runs the Kellogg Creek sewage treatment plant in Milwaukie. When negotiations over sewer rates broke down last summer, the district canceled its contract with Milwaukie.

The Clackamas County board of commissioners, the district’s governing body, set the end of February as a deadline for Milwaukie to enter into a new contract with the district.

Although the strained relationship between the sides had shown signs of improvement, it became clear they wouldn’t reach agreement by then, said Kenny Asher, Milwaukie’s community development and public works director.

“We were staring at this Feb. 28 deadline for the city,” Asher said. With the state Legislature wrapping up its session around the same time, Milwaukie officials saw an opportunity.

“We spoke with Rep. Carolyn Tomei and suggested that there should be a law that kept one government from cutting off service to another government just because rates hadn’t been agreed upon.”

Tomei agreed. “It seems so patently unfair that the county could do that,” she said. Tomei attached an amendment to House Bill 3617, which sailed through the House of Representatives unanimously.

Tomei, a 44-year resident of Milwaukie, said she had been tangentially involved in issues surrounding Kellogg Creek. “Sometimes not-so-tangentially,” she said. “At one point, they were going to extend the treatment plant into our neighborhood, and we got together and stopped that.”

Her amendment would have forced the district to either allow Milwaukie to continue paying its previous sewer rate or go to arbitration.

County officials agreed to mediation with the city; Milwaukie agreed to request that the legislative amendment be removed. It was.

That amendment wasn’t the only thing bringing the sides to the table, district spokeswoman Amy Kyle said. “In the last couple months there’s been quite a bit of progress made in communications between the two sides. I think that (amendment) has contributed to the progress, but there have been a number of positive things.”

Under the agreement, signed last week, city and county officials agree to select a mediator by today and start mediation by Monday. The mediation must wrap up by March 31.

If the sides don’t reach a deal, the issue will go to arbitration. The arbitrators must notify the sides of a decision by the end of May.

The discussions will address only a small piece of the overall disputes between the parties: setting sewer rates for the period from August 2009 to June 2012 and settling existing bills.

“The rate Milwaukie pays is just one of a myriad of issues that has to be resolved in a new wholesale (treatment) contract,” Asher said. Those include the future of the aging Kellogg plant, which occupies valuable real estate along the Willamette riverfront.

The district secured the right to call district members, including Happy Valley and Damascus, as witnesses during the process. “This is a zero-sum game,” Kyle said. “Every decision affects the other ratepayers and all the customers of the district.”

Historically, Milwaukie’s relationship with the district has been unique, and a mediator and arbitrators should see that, Asher said. “Milwaukie is not in the district,” he said. “That’s the key point everyone needs to remember.”

Because both sides have dug into their respective positions, Asher said he’s not sure they’ll be able to reach agreement during the monthlong mediation period. “I hope so, but it’s a short time frame and we’re starting awfully far apart, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it reaches arbitration.”

But he echoed a clause in the framework agreement calling for both sides “to maintain positive, constructive communications” with each other and third parties.

“This is real progress and the beginning of a resolution,” he said. “I think both sides are eager to bring this to a reasonable conclusion.”

Mediation, which will change the way the sides communicate, could create a breakthrough, Kyle said. “With mediation, there’s someone else there other than the ‘us and them’ to guide the conversation. Hopefully, that will be helpful.”

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In the past, whenever Scappoose public works officials had to upgrade a portion of their sewage treatment plant, they had a few main considerations: which parts worked the best for the job and how much the project would cost, for example.

The federal stimulus package added another consideration: where those parts were made.

A “Buy American” provision requires that projects receiving stimulus money use parts made in the United States. Scappoose got $706,000 in stimulus money to improve its treatment plant, which includes an ultraviolet disinfection system.

“One issue we talked about early on was using the Trojan UV system and upgrading it,” said plant supervisor Steve Wabschall. “That system’s made out of Canada.”

Scappoose officials decided to replace some of the system’s parts with American-made components instead of swapping out the whole system. Under a deal that took effect Tuesday, they wouldn’t have needed to worry about buying from Canada.

The U.S. and Canada signed a trade deal last week opening stimulus projects to Canadian suppliers while opening Canadian projects to U.S. suppliers. The deal promises to ease what had become a headache on stimulus projects, particularly water and sewer ones, said Perry Fowler, the director of governmental affairs for the Associated General Contractors of America.

Often, especially in water and sewer project, a needed part has no American makers, Fowler said. “The large pieces of equipment used in treatment facilities, like blowers and ultraviolet treatment systems and membrane filtration systems, a lot of those are manufactured abroad, many in Canada,” he said.

“A lot of those are preferred by the engineers and water authorities for their performance.”

Smaller items may have a single American manufacturer, Fowler said, creating an artificial spike in demand. “A lot of these items with a lot of parts in them are not manufactured in sufficient quantity,” he said. “One manufacturer was granted a virtual monopoly on a pipe fitting of a certain diameter.”

Where finding domestically made parts has been impossible or nearly so, the Environmental Protection Agency, the federal agency responsible for administering water and sewer projects, has granted waivers. The waiver process has gotten smoother, Fowler said, but can still delay projects.

Responsibility for compliance with the Buy American provisions ultimately rests with the contractor on a project, Fowler said. If an EPA inspector finds foreign parts, even if the supplier swore they were domestic, the contractor could face fines or other penalties, he said.
“We tell our members they have to make extra sure they’re well educated,” Fowler said. “If you go out of business because you used a bolt that’s not made in the U.S., that’s contrary to the goals of the Recovery Act, certainly.”

Despite early concerns, the Scappoose project is moving ahead. Tacoma-based general contractor Pease & Sons should start on the project next month, Wabschall said, as soon as parts arrive.

Although the deal with Canada gives U.S. agencies more flexibility in water and sewer projects, Canada isn’t the only foreign supplier for public works projects. Scappoose officials had to pore over parts in their screening, filtration and pumping systems to make sure all were American-made.

“The consulting engineers had to get all the paperwork up front,” Wabschall said. “We have a screen that was originally made in Germany, but I think (the company) has a plant in Georgia now.”

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Sewage treatment plants across the state would have to account for more than 100 water pollutants for the first time under a rule proposed by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. The pollutants range from pesticides and industrial waste products to chemicals in perfumes and shampoos.

“The bulk of the list will be pollutants these wastewater treatment plants have never looked for,” said Chris Gannon with the DEQ‘s water quality program.

While the rule, which stems from a law passed by the 2007 Legislature, focuses on water discharged from treatment plants, the solution lies upstream, said Janet Gillaspie, executive director of the Oregon Association of Clean Water Agencies. “Our leadership and responsibility will be working in an education and outreach type of focus to involve businesses, industry and all Oregonians about all these chemicals and how they can avoid them,” Gillaspie said.

“We’re glad to do our share, but everyone is going to have to do their share.”

The DEQ is receiving public comments this month on the rule, which sets a “trigger level” for 118 chemicals. If treatment plants discharge water containing more than the trigger level, their operators would be required to submit plans to DEQ for reducing the pollution.

That could take a number of forms, anything from encouraging people to stop using certain chemicals to building a system to treat the chemicals. From treatment plant operators’ perspective, it’s much easier to deal with a pollutant before it enters the watershed, Gillaspie said.

“It makes sense that, if you don’t want some of those chemicals in your water, you wouldn’t mix them with millions of gallons of water and then try to remove them,” she said.

Treatment-plant operators have been educating their customers for years, said Dean Marriott, director of the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services. They’ve asked customers to keep grease out of drains, for example, and farmers and gardeners to use pesticides responsibly. “But this would be a major step up in the amount of effort,” Marriott said.

The DEQ rule came out of Senate Bill 737 signed into law in 2007. That bill was a compromise between environmental, municipal and treatment groups to address chemicals in watersheds whose effects were just becoming known, said Teresa Huntsinger, program director for clean and healthy rivers with the Oregon Environmental Council.

“It was created to address the issue of the hundreds of pollutants out there that there are no standards about and not a lot of information on their impacts on human health,” Huntsinger said. Rather than focus on one chemical at a time, the law provides a comprehensive approach, she said.

“If we were to develop water quality standards for all the pollutants on the (Senate Bill) 737 list, it would take forever,” Huntsinger said. “This allows us to start moving forward on getting those chemicals out of our waterways more quickly.”

Under the law, treatment-plant operators will have to report back to DEQ on their plans to reduce any chemical above the trigger level by July 1, 2011. Many operators say they don’t know how many of those chemicals they even have, much less what it would take to reduce them.

“We’re just in limbo waiting to see what DEQ will do,” said Darvin Tramel, pretreatment coordinator with the city of Canby.

Aaron Kunders, superintendent with the St. Helens Wastewater Treatment Plant, said the city will come up with a plan when it figures out which, if any, chemicals exceed the trigger levels. “The problem really is the cost,” he said. “I don’t even know right now how we’re going to do the testing.”

Oregon’s effort relies heavily on treatment-plant operators, Marriott said, but to be successful, it will take a national effort comparable to the push for nutritional labeling on foods.

“Right now, everybody would have difficulty telling the typical consumers where these pollutants are found,” he said. “How do you know what’s in your shampoo and how do you know what would trigger the persistent pollutant lists?

“There’s a lot of work to be done at the local and national levels.”

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