Lebanon
A new study of Lebanon’s wastewater system has found that a key line serving much of the city is close to 80 percent of its capacity, leaving officials weighing whether they wish to make costly upgrades to allow for future development.
The city’s wastewater treatment plant itself is in no immediate danger of reaching capacity, according to city officials. But a major sewer line that moves a high volume of sewage to the West Lebanon treatment plant, known as the interceptor, can handle only an additional 110,000 gallons of wastewater per day before reaching a city-mandated threshold, according to the study, performed by consulting firm Wright-Pierce.
That amounts to the wastewater produced from about 70 new homes, far fewer than are proposed for the Houses on the Hill development at Carter Country Club, which would be served by the interceptor, according to Interim City Manager Paula Maville.
“The results of the study show that there’s not enough capacity in the system to handle the Houses on the Hill development as proposed,” said Maville, who met with the Valley News along with Mayor Sue Prentiss and Assistant Mayor Tim McNamara on Tuesday to outline the implications of the new report. “And it further shows that there’s a limited amount of residual capacity in the system overall.”
The study was ordered to analyze the potential impact of the Houses on the Hill development and was paid for by developer Doug Homan as part of the Planning Board’s preliminary review of his proposal.
The project would develop 283 single-family homes on a 300-acre parcel off of Buckingham Place and Slayton Hill Road.
But the findings from the sewer study are likely to reverberate beyond that project, affecting any newly proposed developments in the city outside of West Lebanon, which doesn’t rely on the interceptor.
The roughly 3-mile system of pipe pulls wastewater from much of Lebanon to the city’s treatment facility off of Route 12A. (Buildings near Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and Centerra send their wastewater to Hanover).
“You’re talking about one pipe that takes all the individual collection pipes from that area,” McNamara, the assistant mayor, said on Tuesday.
Because the interceptor was built over time, different segments contain a variety of pipe sizes, he said. While wastewater passes through some easily, others can become close to full.
“And it’s not just about pipe size. Of equal importance is the slope,” said McNamara, who also leads Dartmouth College’s stormwater management program. Pipes that are angled move wastewater better than those more level to the ground, he said.
While the city will be seeking cost estimates, it’s not yet known how much money would be needed to upgrade the system. Any funding would have to come from the city’s sewer fees or the possible creation of a betterment assessment district, where users would pay a fee to connect to the sewer line.
“Depending on the amount of work, it will not be inexpensive,” Maville said.
Fixes likely would entail removing sections of pipe and replacing them with larger ones. Each section could give the city a small boost in capacity, so officials will have to pick and choose which pipes to replace while weighing costs, McNamara said.
In the Pipeline
The study’s findings likely will extend beyond the Carter Country Club proposal to future projects, city officials said. Developers looking to pursue any new project in much of Lebanon would also be met with the same wastewater limitations, city officials said.
To address the interceptor’s capacity situation, discussions will have to take place across city boards, according to Maville. The Planning Board will have a say, she said, and those talks likely will entail how extensions are granted to developments that have been granted a permit but have yet to be built.
There are at least 29 projects that have been permitted, but construction either hasn’t started or has not been completed, that likely will impact Lebanon’s water and sewer plant, according to the study. For the capacity study, all of them were calculated as though they were complete.
Ongoing projects on the east end of town include the second phase of the Prospect Hills housing subdivision, expected to produce 38,475 gallons of wastewater per day; a hotel and conference center being built along Route 120 near Heater Road at 11,500 gallons a day; and the ICV housing project, at 18,965 gallons.
In West Lebanon, the River Park development is expected to use 150,000 gallons of wastewater per day, and the Iron Horse Park development would utilize 110,838, according to the report, though neither of those projects have broken ground and neither would claim capacity on the interceptor line.
Once a project is approved, it has two years to begin construction before its developers need to return to the Planning Board for an extension.
In part because of the most recent recession, some developments in the city have repeatedly been delayed and granted extensions.
“This is really what the Planning Board members really have to grapple with. It’s not just like, ‘can I have an extension on my homework,’ ” Prentiss said. “(Some projects are) tying up capacity and other implications are really going to have to be considered as (developers) are asking for their third and fourth extension moving forward.”
Prentiss, who served as the City Council’s representative to the Planning Board, cannot remember a developer being denied an extension. And at least one has come back four times, she said.
“At some point in time, the Planning Board’s got to say ‘Are you going to do this or are you not going to do this?’ ” said McNamara, who served as the board’s chairman before being elected to the City Council. He noted that the undeveloped projects hold prized permits but are not yet generating the tax revenue that the city also is counting on.
Slow Down on Development?
Ultimately, any final decision on how Lebanon will move forward to address the study will come from the City Council, Prentiss said.
That decision will have to include whether Lebanon wants to expand its capacity and how to best address future development relying on the city’s sewer system. Both Prentiss and McNamara suggested that the city has little choice except to allow for additional growth.
“I think we’re always going to see capacity ticking along just a little bit more, but in order to sustain who we are today, we’re going to have to make these fixes and be prepared for the future,” Prentiss said. “We can’t go back. We can’t roll ourselves back.”
McNamara said he often hears from employers who say there’s not enough housing in the city to attract workers. He’s not sure the Carter County Club proposal will alleviate housing needs, but said future development in some form will be needed.
“I think we’ve got a ways to go to have an environment that suits the needs of the growing businesses of the Upper Valley,” he said.
But former City Councilor Steve Wood, the owner of an apple orchard who has long called for slowing development in Lebanon, said the study should be a wake-up call for Lebanon to stop approving projects on a “first come, first serve” basis and instead accept that resources are finite.
Wood said the city has a track record of allowing development until its limited infrastructure precipitates a crisis. Roads, sewers and the landfill all have a finite capacity, and the City Council typically expands all of them when developers require it, he said.
“I think the city should be thinking about taking care of its residents and their current needs,” said Wood, who has opposed the Carter Country Club development.
Sewer and water is a limited asset, he said, and the city needs to do a better job conserving it.
Officials shouldn’t just think of sewer costs when they decide whether to upgrade the current system, said former City Councilor Dean Sorenson, who lives in the neighborhood that would be most affected by the Houses on the Hill project.
There also has to be a discussion about how much development costs Lebanon and how much is desirable, he said, noting that residents months ago petitioned the city to research the cost of development on services.
Sorenson said the city is also drifting from its standard approach of only approving developments that can prove they’ll be successful. He said that approach likely saved Lebanon during the 2008 housing crisis, when other communities were left with unfinished and empty projects.
“We don’t go and blow out roads in the fields and (add) water and sewer and wait for the houses to be built,” Sorenson said.
Lebanon’s Planning Board last week had not yet been briefed about the findings of the study.
Carl Porter, the board’s vice chairman, said on Wednesday he hadn’t received a copy of the study.
“Since they need more time and it looks to have been elevated to the city manager, I can only assume that the study did not come back as favorable as it was expected to be,” he wrote in an email.
Regardless of the results, Porter said, the board is expecting to discuss the study and any necessary mitigation based on city staff recommendations during its next meeting in September.
How the Interceptor Was Assessed
The Wright-Pierce study looked at sewer flows downstream of Carter Country Club toward the treatment plant from February through April, and found that Lebanon’s wastewater treatment plant on Market Street can process 3.1 million gallons of water per day, with 1.6 million currently being used.
By adding developments already approved by planners, the plant would see 2.2 million gallons, roughly 70 percent of its capacity.
But when the Carter Country Club project is added to the list, an additional 154,000 gallons per day would hit the system, taking the interceptor above the threshold of 80 percent of capacity in some pipes as wastewater moves to West Lebanon.
Maville said the study did come as a surprise to officials, but it’s one they would have faced in December, as the results of a five-year monitoring project are completed.
“I think we were on the right track. I think the timeliness of this part of the study certainly brought things to light that we potentially should have looked at a little bit earlier,” she said.
The five-year monitoring project was ordered as part of Lebanon’s ongoing combined sewer overflow project, a federally mandated, $69 million effort to separate sewer and stormwater in about 15 miles of Lebanon’s sewer system.
As work on the CSO projects have been finished, that has also helped increase Lebanon’s wastewater capacity by keeping stormwater from traveling through the interceptor.
Dan Nash, a Zoning Board member and engineer who often represents developers in projects before the city, took issue on Thursday with how Lebanon has traditionally calculated sewer flows, sometimes overestimating how much capacity projects will use.
For instance, the study makes findings based on Lebanon’s standard that each residential bedroom will produce 150 gallons of waste per day. But that figure normally is used when designing septic systems, he said, not municipal sewer.
Because it’s important for the ground to absorb septic waste, engineers use the figure as a safety factor, said Nash, who years ago also served as Lebanon’s city engineer.
The average person produces about 70 gallons of wastewater a day, meaning a family of four living in a three-bedroom home would require 280 gallons of capacity, not 450 as suggested by the septic standard and the Wright-Pierce study, Nash said.
Nash was also critical of the city’s threshold allowing only 80 percent of sewer capacity to be used in the interceptor, saying he’s worked in towns operating at higher levels.
“To put unrealistic safety factors on top of safety factors, I think, is a practice that serves to disenfranchise anyone wanting to use those facilities,” Nash said.
If the city sticks to the study’s numbers and findings, he said, it could be a major setback for the Carter Country Club, a point city officials also acknowledge.
“It drags us over capacity,” Maville said of the Carter proposal. “The (283) housing units could not be approved in total at this time.”
City officials met with Homan, the Houses on the Hill developer, on July 21 to discuss the study, Maville said. During that meeting, Homan agreed to postpone hearings on his proposed subdivision as city officials assess ramifications, she said.
“Can the Planning Board approve a phased project that would lead to (283) units even though we don’t potentially have the capacity to serve that right now? What are the legalities involved?” Maville said, listing questions the city still has.
“The (postponement) gives us time to help sort through this,” she said.
Homan, a New London resident, said that he’s also assessing what the study means for his plans around Carter Country Club.
“We just had this bombshell dropped on us in the last few days, so we have no idea how we’ll proceed with this,” he said, adding the city has “major problems to deal with.”
In the short term, Maville said the city will seek cost estimates and different plans to replace pipe along the interceptor. Once that is complete, she said, the city will have a broader discussion about what can be done and how Homan’s project can move forward, if at all.
Asked whether the realization that the interceptor only has 110,000 gallons of capacity remaining means a moratorium on development is possible, Maville said city officials are “looking at options” about future applications to the Planning Board, even as they also begin the process of costing out upgrades to the interceptor.
Prentiss, the mayor, made clear that she believes Lebanon needs to upgrade the interceptor, noting “the cow’s out of the barn” in terms of Lebanon’s role as the commercial and employment hub of the Upper Valley.
“We can’t go back. We can’t roll ourselves back,” she said.
Tim Camerato can be reached at tcamerato@vnews.com or 603-727-3223.