Yarmouth, Dennis and Harwich to vote on wastewater pact at town meetings – Cape Cod Times

Doug Fraser|Cape Cod Times

HARWICH Thanks to COVID-19, the proposal for Harwich, Dennis and Yarmouth to form a regional wastewater district that will build a new treatment plant in Dennis was postponed a year. But voters in all three towns will get to vote on the agreementat town meetings this spring.

Last month, Harwich selectmen voted to place an article on their annual town meeting warrant asking voters to approve joining the Dennis Harwich Yarmouth Clean Waters Community Partnership. Yarmouth selectmen have also put it on their spring town meeting warrant.

Laurie Barr, the Dennis town administrators executive assistant, said selectmen have not yet voted to put articles on the warrant, but Suzanne Brock, a member of the towns Wastewater Implementation Committee, said her committee, which includes a representative from the selectmen, voted to place it on this springs warrant.

Last year, select boards from all three towns approved putting the article on their 2020 town meeting warrants.

The goal is to reap the savings of regionalization as opposed to each town building its own treatment facility.

An estimate provided by consultant David Young of CDM Smith showed the cost of building the wastewater treatment facility, installing the main pipe bringing sewage to the plant and the discharge infrastructure would cost approximately $289 million if each town built its own facility. A regional plant was estimated to cost $213 million, and that $76 million savings was augmented by $6.5 million in the annual cost savings for operations and maintenance of a regional facility.

It cant be overlooked that the efficiency of the regional approach ends up saving each town a lot of money, said Yarmouth Selectman Mark Forest, chairman of the board.

Cape Cod and all of Southeastern Massachusetts is dealing with a wastewater contamination problem that has degraded the water quality of coastal bays, rivers and ponds. Nitrogen and other contaminants in wastewater discharge largely from individual septic systems but also road runoff and lawn and agricultural practices acts like lawn fertilizer promoting the rapid growth of algae in the water. The algae outcompete other native plants and use up the oxygen in the water-creating dead zones.

Cape Cod's cleanup is detailed inwhat is known as Section 208 of the Clean Water Act regional plan. That update, which included more regional approaches,is the result of a 2014 settlement agreement between the Environmental Protection Agency and the Conservation Law Foundation.

CLF has filed more lawsuits in recent years as they see progress moving too slowly in Cape towns. The implicit threat is having a judge decide how the Capes cleanup will proceed instead of towns determining the best and most cost-efficient solutions.

Understandably, financing projects with price tags in the hundreds of millions of dollars had been the big hang-up for most towns, andfor Yarmouth in particular. After a failed vote in 2011, Yarmouth officials decided to remove wastewater projects from the property tax base by using a combination of a surcharge added to the short-term rental tax, a dedicated state clean water fund from the short-erm rental tax, Community Preservation Act money, revenues from solar power projects, and betterments assessed for those who are served by the sewage system.

The DHY regional agreement, which was approved by the state Legislature in 2019, directly stems from the updated regional plan with a watershed approach instead of town by town. Approval of the agreement at town meetings this spring would create a seven-member Wastewater Partnership Commission that oversees the project from construction to annual operation.

Yarmouth will have the highest level of wastewater flowing to the plant and bears the largest burden of construction and other costs, so the commission will include three representatives from Yarmouth, and two each from Dennis and Harwich.

Yarmouth Department of Public Works Director Jeff Colby said that once the agreement is approved, the commission would start contracting for design work on the treatment facility. Unlike major municipal projects that come to town meeting for approval of funds to do design, engineering and construction phases, the towns would be billed by the district for the work, and taxpayer and voter input into the process would go through the wastewater commission, said Colby.

But an additional layer of review was built into the process as the Clean Waters district has to go to select boardsfor approval of their budget and projects, said Colby. Colby said the project will need two years for design and another two for construction with the first flow of sewage to the plant in 2025.

We might be able to tighten that up, Colby said.

The project still seems to be in line for all three towns to take advantage of Massachusetts Department of Transportation road work on Route 28, scheduled for 2024, to save millions by incorporating sewage pipe installation in that project.

Follow Doug Fraser on Twitter:@dougfrasercct

Follow this link:
Yarmouth, Dennis and Harwich to vote on wastewater pact at town meetings - Cape Cod Times