KILLINGLY – For the first time in a quarter of a century, town workers next month will be running and overseeing Killingly’s wastewater treatment plant and its associated systems.
Town Manager Mary Calorio said a 25-year contract with the Suez North America group, which was recently integrated into the Veolia Water Technologies company, is set to expire on June 30. The town several months ago floated the idea of a one-year contract extension to Suez, but the idea failed to gain traction.
“They told us they don’t do one-year contracts and that led us to move forward with taking over the operation as of July 1,” Calorio said.
The town has so far filled all but one of the six plant jobs after several existing Suez employees were re-hired to work as non-union town workers. The job of a Class Four operator – who would handle the day-to-day operations at the plant and report directly to a town department head – still needs to be filled.
In addition to salary costs, the Water Pollution Control Authority, which has its own budget funded through sewer-use fees, will also start footing the bill for chemicals, electricity, waste disposal and general utility costs at the facility.
The town, through the WPCA, pays Suez approximately $210,000 a month for its services.
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“There are also start-up costs for software licenses, iPads for field work and two new vehicles we’d need to fund,” Calorio said. “But we should be able to better control ongoing costs since we won’t be paying any profits to a corporation going forward.”
The software costs are pegged at roughly $30,000 and new vehicles will mean an additional $60,000-$80,000 outlay.
Calorio said it’ll take about two years to get a granular sense of how much the town saved through the switch-over. At that point, a decision will be made to either provide direct savings to system users or invest the savings into needed infrastructure work.
The 50-year-old plant off Wauregan Road in Danielson recently underwent a two-year, multi-million dollar upgrade that included demolition work; replacing original parts too outdated to meet state and federal guidelines for the removal of nitrogen and phosphorous; and the addition of new components, such as four new pumps, aimed at making the plant run more efficiently.
Dave Capacchione, the town’s director of engineering and facilities, said he interacts nearly every day with the plant workers.
“There are no issues with the people there or how they do their job – it’s just the end of a contract,” he said.
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Capacchione said it’s not unusual for a municipality – like Plainfield and Putnam - to run a wastewater treatment plant with its own crews.
“Killingly did that 28 years ago, before this contract, back before it got hard to find qualified staff,” he said.
He said the staff handles a variety of tasks, from lab testing and discharge sampling to clearing line blockages and sending reports to both state and federal environmental agencies.
“The only difference our sewer users should notice with the change-over is the name on the trucks,” Capacchione said.
John Penney can be reached at jpenney@norwichbulletin.com or at (860) 857-6965.