Sewer Project Taps Underused Grant Program
By Jacob Luecke, Columbia Daily Tribune, Mo.
Jan. 5–Boone County has approved its first sizable Bonne Femme improvement project as it continues trying to flush grant money into sewage treatment systems in the watershed.
The $13,000 grant will help pay to upgrade the sewage system at Jack Houseworth’s house on East Spangler Lane, south of Pierpont off Route N.
The house currently uses a rudimentary treatment method that basically amounts to a pipe leading from the house into a small lagoon on the 2.8-acre property. Such simple systems are common and sometimes present an environmental hazard in rural Boone County.
But the grant, which comes from a pot of federal money meant to increase water quality in the Boone Femme watershed, will help Houseworth upgrade to an innovative system using bacteria and underground irrigation pipes to treat waste.
When the new system is installed, sewage from the home will first go through a series of buried treatment tanks. The tanks use aggressive oxygen-consuming bacteria, called aerobic bacteria, to eliminate nutrients in the waste. The treated waste then trickles out into the soil around the home through an irrigation system buried underground.
“Soil as a medium has the highest concentration of naturally occurring aerobic bacteria,” said Kyle Shern, owner of Bio-Gard Inc., which is installing the system on Houseworth’s property. “So this discharge and any residual pathogens or nutrients that would be not taken out through the treatment unit itself would be consumed by the aerobic bacteria that exist in the soil.”
The alternative system is much cleaner than traditional sewage treatment methods.
“Comparing this to a lagoon, it’s really comparing apples to oranges, as far as the discharge quality,” Shern said.
The entire system costs about $22,000. The Bonne Femme grant will pay 60 percent, or about $13,000; Houseworth must pay about $9,000. The Houseworth project is the largest to come from the watershed grant program so far, and the county still has close to $300,000 to distribute before the grant runs out in June.
That means anyone who lives in the 93-square-mile Bonne Femme watershed district, which stretches from south Columbia to north Ashland, can still apply for funding to do sewer improvements in their own backyards.
Terry Frueh, a watershed conservationist overseeing the grant, said he isn’t sure the county will be able to give away all the money. If it doesn’t, the county might just have to give the money back.
“It’s looking iffy,” he said. “There’s still a couple of remote possibilities for teaming up with a developer on a bigger project, but that would have to be moving pretty quickly for that to happen.”
Frueh said some people have been scared away from the grant because they have to pick up 40 percent of the cost in either cash or labor.
“Often people say, Oh, that would be nice to do,’ and then they start looking into the details, and maybe it’s a little more money than they are expecting,” Frueh said.
People interested in applying for a grant can call Frueh at the Boone County Planning and Building Department at 886-4330.
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Copyright (c) 2007, Columbia Daily Tribune, Mo.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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