Omaha’s Sewer Fix to Cost $1.5 Billion

By Karen Sloan, Omaha World-Herald, Neb.

Aug. 19–There will be no cheap fix for Omaha’s sewer problems.

It will cost an estimated $1.5 billion to overhaul a big part of the city’s sewer system to comply with federal rules, city officials told The World-Herald last week.

The cost will ultimately be borne by the residents and businesses that use Omaha’s sewer system. Sewer usage fees are expected to increase exponentially over the next 10 years and beyond.

By 2017, the average homeowner could be paying annual sewer fees of $600 a year. For perspective, that would be more than the city’s current share of property tax for a $100,000 home.

The biggest bills will affect people all over the metro area, from Omaha to Bennington to Bellevue.

Engineers are putting the final touches on Omaha’s preliminary proposal to update its combined sewer system in older parts of the city. That proposal must be submitted to state regulators by October.

The city’s plan includes three major components to help ensure that untreated sewage is not dumped into local waterways, which violates federal clean water rules.

Those are:

–Separate the combined sewers in some parts of the city.

–Build three stormwater treatment plants that operate only in wet weather.

–Construct a 5.8-mile-long tunnel along the Missouri River to carry overflow stormwater to one of the new treatment plants.

Omaha’s problem stems from its combined sewer system, which carries sewage as well as stormwater. The city primarily has combined sewers east of 72nd Street. The lines are separate in western parts of the city.

When it rains a tenth of an inch or more, the system overflows at 32 locations and contaminated water is dumped into the Missouri River and Papillion Creek, thus reducing the quality of the water. These sewer overflows occur about 50 times a year.

Federal regulators have mandated that Omaha reduce the amount of untreated sewage that flows into those waterways by 2024.

Once the preliminary proposal is submitted to the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality in October, the city will have two years to revise the plan.

All of the proposed solutions included in the plan are changes that the city and engineers have been analyzing and talking about for the past year and a half.

When work on the plan began, the city said the cost likely would fall somewhere between $500 million and $3 billion. With the new proposal, city officials now have a much better handle on the cost.

“This is right about where we expected the cost would be,” said Marty Grate, the city’s environmental services manager.

The city is paying $24.7 million to study the issue and develop the plan. The work is being overseen by CH2M Hill, an environmental and management planning company.

Grate said engineers and community members have tried to come up with solutions that are both cost effective and acceptable to the community.

Separating all of the combined sewers in the city was one option explored. But ultimately engineers and city officials decided that would be too expensive and too disruptive to the community because of the number of streets that would be torn up.

Instead, the plan calls for areas in far north Omaha and roughly between 60th and 72nd Streets to get their sewer lines separated.

These separations will help alleviate sewer backups in basements in those areas, but won’t stop all backups citywide. Grate said the city tried to address the backup problems as much as possible, but the primary focus was complying with the federal mandate.

The rest of the problems with overflow into the Missouri River and Papillion Creek will be handled with the construction of three high-rate wastewater treatment plants. Unlike the city’s two existing wastewater treatment plants, these smaller plants would run only during wet weather, and would use a faster chemical process to treat the water.

During storms, overflow stormwater and sewage will be directed to the plants, where the water will be quickly treated and released into either the Missouri River or Papillion Creek.

Two of the new plants are planned on the Missouri River. One will be near the OPPD coal plant in north Omaha, and one will be adjacent to the city’s Missouri River Wastewater Treatment Plant, near the Veterans Memorial Bridge.

The third plant will be on Papillion Creek, somewhere south of 64th and Center Streets.

It’s not yet clear what the three new treatment plants will look like, though Grate said other cities have built plants that resemble residential homes in order to blend with their surroundings.

The biggest single component of the city’s sewer plan is a 5.8-mile-long tunnel that will run along the Missouri River. The tunnel, with a 12.5-foot diameter, will funnel overflow stormwater to the largest of the three new treatment plants.

The plans call for the tunnel to be 170 feet underground in the limestone bedrock, Grate said. It will be undetectable from the surface, with the exception of six shafts providing tunnel access. The tunnel will begin near Gallup University on the north and end at the new treatment plant near Veterans Memorial Bridge.

When it comes to paying for the proposed changes, most residents and businesses will be affected. Everyone who lives in an area that uses the city’s sewer system will see rate increases. That includes Bennington, Girls and Boys Town, Ralston, Gretna, La Vista, Papillion, Carter Lake and Elkhorn, as well as much of Bellevue, unincorporated Douglas County and northern Sarpy County.

Currently, the average residential sewer usage fee is $12 a month, Grate said. This fee appears as a line item on Metropolitan Utilities District bills.

By 2017, the average monthly sewer usage fee will likely be $50 or more. Sewer fees are based, in part, on water usage.

The City Council must approve all sewer rate hikes.

“We’re being upfront that we are talking about significant rate increases,” Grate said. “This is going to be a concern, especially for people with low incomes or those on fixed incomes.”

Already, sewer rates are increasing 9 percent a year until 2010. Grate said the fees could continue to climb beyond 2017.

“It likely will continue to go up, but our crystal ball can’t see out that far with any certainty,” Grate said.

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