MUA will make improvements to lines, treatment
plants to ends years of pollution and leakage
By:Alec Moore
Customers of the Valley Road Sewerage Co., primarily residents of Belle Mead and southern Hillsborough, will soon see their bills for sewer service nearly cut in half, after the service was formally taken over by the Hillsborough Township Municipal Utility Authority.
After almost 15 years of being mired in litigation and more than six years of being held in receivership the Valley Road Sewerage Co. is now in the hands of the HTMUA. The transfer of ownership became official on April 1, when the MUA purchased the Valley Road company’s assets including its two faulty water treatment facilities on Fieldhedge Drive and Millstone River Road for $700,000.
Gail Quabeck, executive director of the MUA, indicated that finalizing the sale and taking over the assets of the Valley Road Sewerage Co. has been a welcome relief.
"It went on for a long time and there were points at which we thought this sale would never go through," she said, noting that over the course of the negotiations some form of "roadblock" always seemed to impede any progress that was made towards completing the sale.
Ms. Quabeck said she has received a number of calls from former Valley Road customers saying they are relieved that they no longer have to contend with the company.
In the long run, the MUA plans to dismantle both of the company’s faulty treatment facilities and connect former Valley Road customers to the Somerset-Raritan Valley Sewerage Authority’s treatment facility in Bridgewater.
Before that can be done, however, the MUA must adhere to an agreement with the state Department of Environmental Protection to repair both of the faulty treatment facilities to allow for more efficient operations.
In addition, the MUA must repair all leaks in the Valley Road sewer lines.
Ms. Quabeck said that the MUA has already begun the process of locating and fixing sewer line leaks and has also begun repair work on the two faulty treatment facilities. She cautions that the overall process will not be a speedy one and anticipates that it may take between three to five years to complete.
She added that former Valley Road customers cannot be connected to the MUA’s sewerage system utilizing the Somerset-Raritan sewerage treatment facility until the rehabilitation of the Valley Road sewerage system has been completed.
"It’s going to take a while before we can get to the whole (Valley Road) system," she said.
The MUA has two years to inform the NJDEP of how and when it will dismantle the faulty treatment facilities. Once the faulty treatment facilities have been rehabilitated, and subsequently done away with, the former Valley Road customers will have to pay $1,127 to be connected to the Somerset-Raritan treatment facility. A five-year payment plan will be available.
Ms. Quabeck noted that sump pumps that are improperly connected to sanitary water supplies rather than waste water deposits are making it more difficult for the MUA to locate and repair leaks in the former Valley Road sewer lines. The improperly connected sump pumps end up pumping dirty, contaminated water into the MUA’s sanitary sewer system, which holds clean rain water.
"No one should have sump pumps connected to sanitary sewer systems," she said.
While the reconnection process may be a lengthy one, residents can take comfort in knowing that they will not have to wait any length of time before they notice a drastic reduction on their sewer bill. The former Valley Road rates have already been re-adjusted to MUA rates, marking a 33 percent decrease.
Throughout the course of the litigation between the Valley Road Sewerage Co., the residents and the MUA, Valley Road officials had been trying to raise its rates to $1,200 per year. That increase was blocked by the state’s Board of Public Utilities.
The roughly 550 residents who had been paying $570 per year to the Valley Road Sewerage Company will now be paying $380 per year to the MUA, the same rate that the MUA’s longtime 10,600 customers pay.
The long saga of the Valley Road Sewerage Co. began about 15 years ago when a consortium of concerned citizens, called Citizens for Better Sewer Services, filed suit in federal court against the company for violating water pollution laws.
In light of the pollution and the deterioration of the company’s treatment facilities, the township and the state Board of Public Utilities then urged the MUA to take over the company through an acquisition of its assets.
Federal and state courts both agreed and then declared that the Valley Road Sewerage Co. had been plagued by mismanagement and gross incompetence. The court appointed attorney Robert Goode to serve as receiver of company and ordered him to liquidate the company’s assets for sale to the MUA.