ALLENTOWN – The Upper Freehold Regional School District may tie its new middle school into the borough’s existing wastewater treatment facility.
School district officials met with representatives from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) Dec. 11 to discuss wastewater options for the new middle school site along Breza Road, according to Board of Education President Joseph Stampe.
The Board of Education voted Sept. 19 to have a 40,000-gallon-per-day wastewater facility designed for the new middle school site but has also continued to explore the possibility of hooking the school site into the Allentown facility.
As designed, the middle school will house 920 students but with an addition has the potential to ultimately house 1,200 students. The additional acreage that the school district purchased along Breza Road could potentially house another school for 666 students, which is the size of an elementary or primary school.
Stampe said that the board had been told at one point in the middle school construction process that the Allentown facility did not have enough capacity to handle the added flow from a new middle school. However, he said Allentown and the DEP conducted an 11-month review of the borough’s plant and came to a different conclusion.
Stampe said the study determined that excess stormwater had been leaking into the facility and that the plant actually has an additional 70,000-gallon-perday capacity.
“We could indeed tap into Allentown,” Stampe said.
He continued, “We determined that the new middle school would need a 28,000-gallon-per-day capacity and that a second school would need between a 10,000-gallon per-day and a 12,000- gallon-per-day capacity. That’s why [the board] voted to have a 40,000- gallon-per-day facility designed.”
In order to tie the new school into the existing wastewater facility in Allentown, Stampe said the school district would have to apply for a wastewater management plan revision.
“Our professionals had concerns that the revision application would derail the current application, and we were assured it would not,” Stampe said, adding that the board can submit the new application to the DEP for a $5,000 fee.
The school district has already had to apply for a wastewater management plan revision in order to get the necessary approval for building its own on-site wastewater facility. For the construction of the on-site wastewater facility, the school district also had to apply to the DEP for the required New Jersey Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NJPDES) permit.
Tying the school site into the existing Allentown facility would negate the need for an NJPDES permit, according to Stampe.
“All we would have to do is apply for the TWA [Treatment Works Approval], which has a lead time of 90 days,” he said.
The school’s construction cannot be bid until after the district receives TWA from the DEP. The board hopes to have that approval no later than January 2008 to keep the project on a timeline consistent with the new school opening in September
2010.
The board’s vice president, William Borkowski,
said that although the
school district has already
applied for the
NJPDES permit for its
own wastewater facility,
it should pursue the
alternative path of tying into the Allentown facility because doing so could save time and money.
“We can pursue the alternative path while continuing on the path that we are on,” Borkowski said. “If everything goes in accordance to the timeline, we could pick up one month and save $1.9 million because we wouldn’t have to build our own wastewater plant.”
The board has estimated the cost of building a 40,000-gallon-per-day facility at $2.5 million. If built, the facility and its 40,000-square-foot disposal bed would be located in the southeast corner of the site near Doctors Creek, where the soil is higher and water can flow more freely as it gets closer to the streambed, according to American Water representatives.
The company’s representatives also told the board that the stream is considered a Category 2 stream, which does not produce trout, and that the wastewater treatment facility would not harm the stream.
Regarding the possibility of tying into the Allentown plant, Superintendent of Schools Richard Fitzpatrick has said that the borough’s facility discharges to surface and that the state would not consider modifications to the plant unless they discharged to ground. The board has not discussed whether such modifications to the plant would be necessary for the tie-in or if the school district or Allentown would be responsible for making such modifications.
Borkowski said that the board’s professionals are scheduled to address the wastewater facility issues with the public at the Jan. 9 meeting.
Stampe said that any final decision regarding the wastewater issues would have to be cost-efficient to the taxpayers and able to maintain the new middle school project’s timeline. He added that the board would have to vote to change its path from building an on-site wastewater facility to tying into the existing facility.