A judge has approved a milestone settlement between the federal and state governments and the Scranton Sewer Authority authorizing $140 million in upgrades over 25 years to prevent pollution of the Lackawanna River and its tributaries from sewer overflows.
Under a consent decree approved Thursday in federal court, the authority also will pay $340,000 in fines to the federal and state governments for past overflow pollution.
Read: Scranton Sewer Authority federal consent decree
The pact ends a legal dispute pitting the federal Environmental Protection Agency and state Department of Environmental Protection against the SSA, and will usher in a series of sewer upgrades to take place over the next quarter-century. Most work will involve installing numerous underground precast storage tanks to capture storm overflow and gradually release it after storms are over, while "green" initiatives will help reduce storm flows.
"For the Northeast Pennsylvania region and statewide, and even regional-wide with the EPA, I think this is a landmark event and a good place to turn the page," said Bernie McGurl, executive director of the Lackawanna River Corridor Association, a nonprofit river advocacy organization. "It's closing one chapter and opening up an entire new chapter with the sewer authority and the community."
The pact ends a dispute from a 2009 EPA lawsuit against the SSA that claimed it illegally discharged more than 1 billion gallons of untreated sewage into the Lackawanna River in 2008 in "combined sewer overflows."
The authority's 25 million-gallons-per-day wastewater treatment plant serves some 87,000 people in Scranton and Dunmore. Its 275 miles of sewer lines in a 10,000-acre service area flow into a treatment plant that discharges effluent into the Lackawanna River, a feeder of the Susquehanna River, which flows into Chesapeake Bay.
Under the settlement, the SSA will implement short- and long-term initiatives as part of a multistate effort to reduce nutrient discharge into waterways that feed the polluted Chesapeake Bay. The agreement sets forth projects and timetables to fix problems with the combined sewer system, which, when overwhelmed by stormwater, frequently discharges raw sewage, industrial waste, nitrogen, phosphorus and polluted water into the Lackawanna.
The settlement was not unexpected; it had been announced by the EPA in December. A 30-day public comment period ended last month with no comments, the consent decree said.
The pact represents a marked decrease from an initial EPA-mandated plan in 2006 calling for $200 million in upgrades over 12 years. The authority instead will spend $60 million less in upgrades and will have twice as many years to implement the improvements, authority officials have said.
Still, "This is going to be one of the largest public-works projects in regional history," Mr. McGurl said. Along with easements and acquisitions, "Roads are going to have be dug up. There will be inconveniences," he said.
Contact the writer: jlockwood@timesshamrock.com