The City of Guthrie will need to find an estimated $44,000 of unbudgeted money after the Department of Environmental Quality found a violation at the Guthrie Waste Water Treatment Plant last June.
ODEQ found secondary violations and/or deficiencies on June 1st on a routine check up of the plant. Most of the items were easily remedied, or scheduled for remedial action, but the one item, that was listed first on the list, addressed the primary and secondary clarifiers.
The skimmer arms of both clarifiers are short which does not allow for adequate scum collection. To determine the problem of repair, they had to drain the tanks. A clarifier in wastewater treatment plants is the primary process to separate solids and water.
After the June 28th letter of notification and the draining of the tanks, at a cost of $5,000, the contractor gave a more substantial estimate of the complete cost. That estimate came back at $44,000 for repairs that would need to be complete in order to satisfy the ODEQ.
“This obviously presents a hardship to the City as it is another significant cost caused by an unfunded mandate at a time when revenues are tight and our ability to address needs continues to get eroded away,” Guthrie City Manager Matt Mueller said.
“This project will have to go out to bid and we will be reviewing existing line items to determine where we can find the money to satisfy this mandate,” Mueller concluded with.
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