The Florida Department of Environmental Protection is issuing a consent decree to Palm Coast government requiring the city to improve and expand one of its two sewer plants by 2028. The decree, which city officials say they have voluntarily requested, is a direct result of a system under strain and often over capacity.
Compliance will be expensive, with ultimate costs of expansion and refurbishment of Water Treatment Plant 1 in the $200 million range. Some of that may be paid with development impact fees, because it will expand the treatment plant (impact fees may only be spent on expansion, not maintenance or improvements of existing infrastructure). But a substantial portion of the cost will be the responsibility of existing rate-payers. “The other portion has to come from the rates,” City Manager Lauren Johnston said, “the current users.”
The administration had sought just such rate increases when its consultant last November submitted a plan to the City Council combining impact fee increases with rate increases. Rate increases would have totaled 18 percent over three years. The council recoiled. It approved an increase in impact fees, which affect only builders and buyers of new homes. It rejected the rate increase.
The council was obviously aware of the utility’s needs. But it was hoping for help from Tallahassee. Its legislative ask this year included $35 million for Wastewater Treatment Plant 1 (to expand capacity to 9 to 10 million gallons per day). The request was pared down to just $1 million by the time it reached the governor’s desk. The governor vetoed the $1 million. He also vetoed $9 million lawmakers had approved for other city water and drainage projects.
The only dollars the governor did not veto were earmarked for the so-called “westward expansion”‘s loop road from Matanzas Woods Parkway to Palm Coast Parkway, a project that will largely benefit the landowner overseeing future development there: Rayonier. In essence, state dollars will subsidize the city’s expansion, while existing residents will have to shoulder the cost of ensuring continued proper sewer service.
This year of delay only pushed back the inevitable, though it isn’t clear whether the city could have avoided the consent decree.
Going by the city’s calculation of the way DEP averages out capacity over a year, Palm Coast’s older water treatment plant was over capacity in four of the last 12 months. (DEP actually had the system over capacity for more months than that, but the city is disputing the number.) The decree is a legal document that ensures localities are in compliance with state and federal regulations. It has the force of law and may be enforced with costly fines. It will require the city to comply with a timeline or face consequences.
With a consent decree hanging over the city’s collective neck, the days of pushback are over: if the council intends to comply with the decree, and it has little choice in the matter, it will have to follow a plan narrowly tailored to finding the money to pay for expanding capacity and improving the system. (Which raises the intriguing question: did the city administration seek out the consent decree as leverage against further political hesitancy by the council?)
The council will hear that plan on Tuesday.
It starts with a so-called “gap analysis,” or a “gap rate analysis,” which means what it says: the analysis seeks to define the gap between what’s in place now and what’s needed in order for a system to function at the desired capacity. Once the gap is determined, then the method and cost of closing that gap can be laid out, like a blueprint. Once the cost is determined, then the means of meeting those costs have to be met, combining impact fees and utility rates. The council has already raised impact fees and may not do so again for a set period of time. That leaves rates, though that increase will be determined by the gap analysis.
The analysis will cost about $70,000.
At a workshop on Tuesday, the administration will explain all that and ask the City Council to approve spending the necessary dollars for a gap analysis. Luckily for three of the four council members (Council members Ed Danko and Nick Klufas and Mayor David Alfin), they’ll get to approve that request at their meeting on Oct. 15, but they will not be on the council by the time the gap analysis results return to the council, and rates have to be increased. That’ll be the job of the new council, who will hope that since they are so early in their term, rate-payers will not remember the pain when it’s time to vote again. The exception is Council member Theresa Pontieri, who’s up for election in two years, though unlike her three colleagues, had she been on the ballot this year she would likely have won re-election handily.
The city owns its own water utility, which runs two sewer plants (or wastewater treatment plants) and three water plants. It’s a $71 million operation with an $80 million capital project fund run by 166 employees. Waste Water Treatment Plant 1 on Utility Drive, at the edge of the Woodlands, is a 50-year-old plant. It has a capacity of 6.83 million gallons per day. Wastewater Treatment Plant 2 off U.S. 1 has a capacity of 2 million gallons per day, with an additional 2 million gallons of capacity expected by late winter or early spring next year.
The system has been experiencing what the city calls “sanitary sewer overflows” in times of heavy rain. That’s caused by stormwater, which can only be processed at a certain speed. In heavy storms, the processing is not as cleansing as it can or should be, so the processed effluent ends up being less clean than it could be.
As the utility stands today, it still has an overall capacity of 1.3 to 1.5 million gallons of wastewater per day in normal times (outside of heavy stormwater events). But that capacity is expected to erode over the next five years as the remaining 7,500-some vacant lots platted by ITT in PALM Coast are built up. The expansion of the older treatment plant will extend the city’s overall capacity beyond that. But after expansion, the city will still have to build a third wastewater treatment plant. But that’s for another day. “Right now we need to move toward rehabilitating Wastewater Treatment Plant 1,” the city manager says.
