By Claire Pomer, Harwood Union correspondent
About 40 people showed up on May 8, when the Waitsfield Wastewater Project team held a public meeting to discuss the proposed municipal wastewater system for Waitsfield Village and Irasville. On June 11, there will be a bond vote to determine if the select board can pursue funding for this project.
Select board member Chach Curtis and project manager Annie Decker-Dell’Isola, members of the Wastewater Project Team, presented a slideshow detailing the proposal and answered questions. They summarized the project, explained why it’s applicable now, presented sketches of what the facility would look like, and broke down the finances.
Some of the questions had to do with whether the town plans to mandate people hooking up to the system. The town does not plan to mandate that and does not plan to charge fees for people to join the system.
Waitsfield is the largest Vermont village and ski town without a centralized wastewater system. Due to the town’s proximity to the Mad River and its flood plains and wetlands, this poses an environmental and public health threat. It’s also expensive; replacing sewage systems is costly and falls solely on the homeowners or business owners with private septic systems. Twenty-seven percent of the village leach fields (a wastewater disposal facility, also called septic tank drain fields) are in flood plains or river corridors, and 26% of the village leach fields are near well shields. If the river floods, these leach fields can easily contaminate the water.
AVERAGE LIFESPAN
The average lifespan of a septic system is 15-40 years (what Curtis referred to as their “shelf life.”) Currently, 43% of systems in the villages are over 30 years old. These systems can cost over $60,000 to replace and pose a public health risk. “It’s really the next step in line with our own organizational mission and history, recognizing that these older systems pose a risk to human health and the health of the river,” said Ira Shadis, the executive director of Friends of the Mad River, in a video promoting the project.
Waitsfield, like the rest of The Valley and Vermont, is in the midst of a housing crisis. “Our employees have a lot of challenges finding housing here in The Valley that they can afford,” Sean Lawson, one of the owners of Lawson’s Finest Liquids, said in the same video. “Even housing that’s available to rent or to buy. Many of our employees live in the towns outside of The Valley because that was the only place that they could even find or afford.” Creating a municipal septic system would free up setbacks for wells and septic systems.
Kaiya Korb, the principal of Waitsfield Elementary, used the school as an example. “The central part of the school building was built before there was a man on the moon,” she said, and explained that the various additions were all built later on. The school has two septic systems, so if they wanted to build another addition, they “would have nowhere to build without infringing upon where our wastewater systems are.”
From fall 2021 to January 2023, the Wastewater Project Team undertook a Feasibility Study, which identified eight potential sites for treatment centers, going as far north as Tremblay Road. In 2023, the team commissioned a Preliminary Engineering Report (a PER), which determined that there are 128 systems in Irasville and Waitsfield creating 102,506 gallons per day. It selected an SBR (Sequencing, Batch, Reactor) system, which is known for its viability in cold climates. There are 40 SBR systems in New England, and a dozen in Vermont, including one in nearby Sugarbush. It also identified a final site for a treatment center: the Munn field, which the town of Waitsfield has owned since 2000.
THREE PARTS
The proposed wastewater system has three parts: collection, conveyance, and treatment. Sewage will be collected from homes and villages at no cost to the owners, then sent through a three-mile-long pipe running along Route 100. There will be four storage and pumping stations along the conveyance pipe to collect solids. Finally, the liquid waste will arrive at the Munn field, a 12-acre piece of land owned by the town of Waitsfield. It will have one control building, a leach field, and tanks (kept underground for “minimal visual impact”). The control building is out of flood plains, ensuring that the water won’t be contaminated. This project will service the Waitsfield Village and Irasville. The Munn site will be able to hold and process 89,000 gallons of wastewater per day. Priority parcels -- users with septic systems in river corridors and flood plains, along with systems that are more than 40 years old -- produce 65,000 gallons per day, which is 79% of the Munn site’s calculated capacity. New demand can account for 27% of capacity, at about 24,000 gallons per day, which is about 70 new one- or two-bedroom homes or an 8-10% increase in “commercial demand.”
The cost of this project will be $15,005,518. That breaks down with $3,702,900 going towards the Munn site treatment construction; $8,639,300 will go towards the wastewater collection system construction; $199,418 has already been spent on the Feasibility Study and the PER; $604,400 will go towards the Engineering Final Design; $1,108,100 will go towards Construction Engineering; and $751,400 will go towards other miscellaneous costs (such as archaeology and legal costs). The project team anticipates that these costs will be covered by low interest long-term loans and grants. The long-term low interest loan will be paid back by system users. To date the Vermont DEC Clean Water State Revolving Fund, has covered the Feasibility Study and the PER. Should sufficient grants and loans not materialize, the town will not go forward with the project and the select board passed a resolution to that effect at its May 13 meeting this week.
There will be one additional select board meeting on June 3 about the wastewater project before the bond vote. The meeting is at 6:30, held at the Waitsfield Town Office and accessible via Zoom. Voting for the bond is open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on June 11 at the Village Meeting House and mail-in ballots will be mailed to all voters.
For those who have questions about the project there will be coffee hour open sessions on Fridays, May 17, May 24, May 31, and June 7 at Three Mountain Café in Waitsfield from 10:30 a.m. to noon. A member of the wastewater planning team will be on hand to answer questions.
