The Seeley Lake Sewer Board authorized Water & Environmental Technologies, or WET, to move forward with a feasibility study for a wastewater treatment system, which will assess things like the project’s schedule, cost, technology requirements and overall viability.
While the timeline is uncertain, this step is one towards defining what wastewater treatment will look like in Seeley Lake, which could include different types of treatment in different areas of town.
The engineering company expects the first four phases of the study, which include project management, identifying priority treatment zones, developing treatment requirements for those zones and technology evaluations, should begin on May 1 and take about eight to 10 weeks to complete. The next four phases will be scheduled once technology and funding are identified.
Bill Decker, Seeley Lake Sewer District manager, said the board won’t be able to go after funding for construction until the design is finalized. A lot of funding for big infrastructure projects is tied to the state Legislature, and it likely won’t be until the 2027 session before the district would be able to access monies for construction from the state.
“In the meantime we’re still going to go after some grants to pay for engineering and the feasibility study,” Decker said.
A week after the sewer district board meeting, Decker got a call from representatives from Rep. Ryan Zinke’s office, informing him of some potential federal money available to the district for the wastewater project.
Water sampling has been completed — though Missoula County is continuing to monitor different wells to better understand groundwater flow, amongst other water characteristics — and Steve Anderson, engineer with WET, said the majority of dense development — the residential downtown area, businesses — is where some of the “hot spots” of nitrate contamination show up. It has also been confirmed that the nitrate levels in groundwater are from human sources through further testing conducted by the sewer district.
“What we proposed in our original (plan) and what we’re still proposing is to try to look at these hotspot areas and some of the surrounding areas and see if we can delineate priority treatment zones,” Anderson said. “We know that (the) central housing area needs to be treated (and) we know the business corridor should have some kind of major treatment.”
Once priority treatment areas are identified, the feasibility study will define treatment requirements for the different areas, like stricter treatment in the center of town, for example. Some areas with less contamination could be treated differently.
After that, different wastewater treatment technologies will be evaluated, everything from the original engineering report from the 2021 project that was rejected by voters to a membrane bioreactor that has been presented to the board this year, and other options in between.
Anderson said it’s important to get the solution started so the board doesn’t miss any upcoming funding cycles for different grants at the state and federal levels. He said he will come up with a matrix to evaluate wastewater technologies based on capital, operation costs, how much land is required and longevity of the plant, among other aspects.
“Once we have all that done, we’re going to have our chosen technology. We’re going to have our treatment zones all laid out. We’re going to have kind of a rough plan of where the sewers are going to go,” Anderson said. “And from that point, then we move on to a preliminary treatment system — collection system — design.”
At the April meeting, the sewer board heard from representatives with Montana Disaster and Emergency Services, which works with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, about grants available to help with the costs of a wastewater project. Two main options were discussed — the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program and the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRICK grants, both which require Missoula County to be the sponsor.
Money is added to the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program after a presidential disaster declaration is made — for something like a wildfire or flood — and is prioritized to areas that were impacted by the disaster. Applications can be submitted to access this money a year later, and don’t have to be tied directly to the disaster, but to a type of mitigation project, which representatives from FEMA said something like water quality improvement would fall under.
A $50 million maximum federal share is placed on BRICK grants. The federal government usually covers 75% of the cost of a project awarded a BRICK grant and the local jurisdiction covers the remainder. During Montana’s 2023 Legislature, a resiliency fund was partially funded with $16 million over four years, which in part could help localities offset the cost of that remaining 25%, DES representatives said at the meeting.
The sewer board moved to close the current grant cycle they were operating in in order to start applying for new grants.
It is also considering applying for a wastewater treatment design before the feasibility study is finished to get started on applying for grants from FEMA to help pay for the different phases of the feasibility study.
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