The City of Fulton is applying to the Missouri Department of Natural Resource's State Revolving Fund today for nearly $13 million to put toward improvements at the city's waste water treatment plant.
If approved, receipt of the funds also will require approval from voters in April 2013 to receive $12.97 million in bonds through the State Revolving Fund.
Project manager Stan Christopher and engineer Patrick Denning with engineering consulting firm HDR, Inc. were present at Tuesday night's Fulton City Council meeting.
"Our purpose is to bring you up to speed on where we are, and where we're going," Christopher said.
After briefly running through the reasons for the proposed upgrades - primarily federal regulations with more stringent guidelines - Christopher said his firm worked hard to come up with a plan for improvements while still keeping sewer rates as reasonable as possible.
"For years and years, DNR said it was okay to discharge from the lagoon," said Fulton Director of Administration Bill Johnson. "Now they're saying everything has to have at least two treatments."
Christopher also pointed out that Fulton is hardly the only city facing such challenges.
"You're not standing alone on an island with a lot of these issues," he said.
He explained that Fulton's primary problem is that its lagoon has discharges that go into Stinson Creek that new regulations will require the city to clean.
Denning said that the plant currently is rated to process 2.93 million gallons of waste water per day, but on days when there are large storms, or a string of days with a large amount of rainfall, it gets closer to 8 million gallons per day. The extra water goes into the lagoon, with no way for it to get back to the treatment plant first. When the lagoon reaches its limit, it overflows into Stinson Creek.
The HDR plan calls to maximize the volume the lagoon (or, as Denning referred to it, holding basin) can store, install a drain from the holding basin to the plant and to maximize the amount of inflow the plant can process.