Sewer Open House Draws a Crowd!
The Open House to discuss a sewer plan for the Olds Station and Sunnyslope areas last night drew quite a crowd of 60 plus! It opened with Chelan County Commissioner Buell Hawkins discussing the history of the situation in Olds Station.
In the past, the PUD has put sewer mains in the Olds Station area and has served the fruit warehouses and primarily the Port of Chelan properties in the area. Virtually all remaining connections available have been banked by the port for their future needs. The main that runs to the city sewer plant on Worthen is also at capacity as well as the pumping stations serving the area. High volumes of biosolids from the fruit processing facilities have also caused issues for the sewer treatment plant in Wenatchee.
The situation was basically where the city did not control what was coming into their system and there was no ability or incentive to expand service to an area that is slated to take a large share of growth in the region. So, several years ago the city, county, port and PUD started working together to address the situation.
A plan was developed on how the system could be upgraded incrementally to allow additional service while scaling capital costs to the usage. The open house last night was the introduction to the public on how a plan might be developed from here and what interest there might be from the public.
There are basically three types of customers that might be served in the future, industrial customers, existing dense residential areas like Chatham Hill and future residential customer on Sunnyslope. Much of the discussion surrounded the possibility of using Local Improvement Districts to fund providing service to areas in Chatham Hill.
According the attendees and the county, there are failing septic systems in neighborhoods that have lots too small to allow replacement drain fields to be installed. Connection to sewer may be the only alternative that would allow residents to be able to sell their homes in that area in the future.
Both the city and county stressed that they weren’t there to force anything on anybody, but were there to listen and help address concerns. It was not expected that sewer service would go very far up Sunnyslope in the next few years.
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