A three-page letter from the Derby Water Pollution Control Authority to a supervising sanitary engineer with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Conservation can be deconstructed as such:
“ARE YOU KIDDING ME, DENNIS?”
First, some background.
On May 12, Mayor Anita Dugatto received a letter from Dennis Greci, a DEEP supervising sanitary engineer with the planning and standards division of the bureau of water protection and reuse.
Greci’s letter picked apart the Derby WPCA’s “facilities plan,” a document that lays out planned short-term and long-term upgrades and repairs to the city’s sewage treatment plant and collection system.
Greci’s letter said he was “puzzled” by Derby’s plan, because the scope of work was limited and spread out over years.
Click here for a previous Valley Indy story.
“After reviewing your facility planning document we were somewhat puzzled that a limited scope of the plant upgrades are being proposed. A large portion of the needed upgrades are not scheduled to occur until 2027 and be completed by 2032 which is almost twenty years from now,” the letter reads.
The letter also said DEEP could not approve the facilities plan because of the issues.
A copy of the DEEP letter to Derby is below:
Deep to Derby by ValleyIndyDotOrg
And now, some fallout.
The DEEP letter sent the Derby WPCA board into a tizzy. They are the group of appointed volunteers, led by chairman John Saccu, responsible for the WPCA budget.
For more than a year, the WPCA has been trying to educate local politicians and the public on the need for major upgrades to the city’s sewer system, which has been neglected for years, the Derby WPCA’s engineers said.
The WPCA has been in the process of putting together a multi-million dollar referendum in order to make repairs and upgrades. The key phrase is “in the process,” because there is still no date on when the issue will be put to voters.
Click here for a story that has documents and video in which engineers explain the challenges facing the city’s sewer infrastructure.
The video at the top of this story is from last year, when Saccu answered a question at a public forum as to why Derby neglected its sewer issues for so long.
At a Derby WPCA meeting in June, Saccu said the DEEP letter essentially knee-capped the Derby referendum.
How could the public ever vote yes on plans that “puzzled” DEEP?
“It doesn’t preclude our plans for a referendum, but it makes it very difficult for us,” Saccu said last month.
On June 25, the WPCA responded to DEEP’s letter with, yes, a letter of their own.
The Derby WPCA letter points out that before work even started on the embattled facilities plan, DEEP reviewed the scope of work and had no problems with it.
When the work was finished, DEEP reviewed the document, offered comments, but never indicated staff was “puzzled” by the plan.
Why, seemingly out of the blue, did DEEP have issues with a study they had previously been ambivalent about?
A copy of the Derby WPCA letter to DEEP is embedded below.
The Derby WPCA letter also goes off on the “Derby-Ansonia Interconnection,” an idea that has been kicking around both cities for years. That’s a plan that would see Derby send sewage to Ansonia’s new treatment plant for processing.
Former Mayor James Della Volpe pushed for the interconnect hard in the months leading up to the November 2013 municipal election. Della Volpe, at a press conference in September, said that regionalizing the Derby and Ansonia WPCA could save money on annual bills in Ansonia, where residents are paying $270 a year to pay off their new treatment plant.
At the press conference, state legislators backed Della Volpe’s request that the state DEEP conduct a study study whether it makes financial sense to regionalize the Ansonia and Derby waste water treatment systems.
Click here to read more about the September press conference.
In the months after taking office, Derby Mayor Anita Dugatto met with both Ansonia Mayor David Cassetti and state DEEP about connecting Derby to Ansonia.
Derby WPCA engineers maintain that though the interconnect idea is worth pursuing, there’s no way it can happen before Derby addresses serious issues within its sewer system, such as the influx of rain water from storm drains into the sewer system.
Furthermore, Derby WPCA engineers said that Ansonia will have to make capacity upgrades to their brand new treatment plant if it is to handle Derby’s flow.
Meanwhile, Mayor Anita Dugatto said the Derby WPCA needs to do more work to investigate whether connecting to Ansonia is the thing to do.
The interconnect feasibility was to be addressed in the comprehensive report by Derby WPCA engineers. The report (2010) never fully investigated the interconnect option,” Dugatto said in am e‑mail Thursday. “The full report was never accepted by DEEP, as it stands in DRAFT form. If we are to move forward, the state regulations need to be addressed and the people of Derby need the full story.”
Saccu spoke to the Ansonia WPCA at their June 4 meeting, where minutes indicate he asked its members “to keep communication open between the two cities.”
The minutes of the meeting say Nunzio Parente, the Ansonia WPCA chairman, said the interconnect idea was “doable” but raised concerns about the capacity of the plant to accommodate Derby’s wast water.
