ALLENTOWN – The design of a new waste water treatment plant is about 35 percent complete, according to the engineer who is designing the new infrastructure for Allentown.
However, a Sept. 28, 2018, memorandum from Borough Engineer Carmela Roberts to Borough Council President Thomas Fritts states that work on the design has slowed.
During an Oct. 9 council meeting, members of the governing body asserted that Mayor Greg Westfall has taken actions that have prevented the project from advancing at a faster pace.
In her memo to Fritts, Roberts wrote that “within three weeks of our authorization to begin work of May 31, 2018, the mayor was getting involved in our work and directing us on how to evaluate options to address ammonia. Within two weeks of that, he was requesting additional information about the treatment process and was not satisfied that what we were proposing was adequate.
“Within two more weeks, I was at a meeting with the Borough Council for a discussion about how the project was to move forward and what the project would be: staying at the existing location (on Breza Road) or moving up the hill. By Aug. 3, 2018, the mayor, without knowledge of others, had a phone meeting with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to discuss moving the treatment plant into the Green Acres area on the field next to the existing plant.
“By Aug. 13, 2018, I was contacted by the DEP to provide pre-application meeting information, because of the mayor’s phone call. By Aug. 14, I was meeting with council to discuss this and council was clear in that the plant would stay where it is, and I was to move forward doing the original request,” Roberts wrote in the memo.
“By early September, the mayor was in contact with the New Jersey Office of Emergency Management, which led to a refusal to schedule a meeting with the borough and DEP, because they intended to have a meeting on Sept. 24. On Sept. 25, I was back in front of council asking for clear direction on how to move forward.
“It has been every two to three weeks before we have been interrupted with the possibility there has been a change in direction for what is happening at the sewer plant. The difficulty has been that the mayor seems to be moving in a direction that the remainder of council is not.
“We have plans to preliminary 35 percent completion and have remained so for a number of weeks. We have brought in a structural engineer to evaluate existing facilities and at this point we are moving forward with the determination of sludge disposal locations and moving onto the electrical design.
“With each episode, we have spun wheels, investigated, responded to DEP, evaluated funding, calculated costs of movement of the treatment plant up the hill, discussed with council, attended council meetings, and spent much of our time that could have gone to actual design of the plant on chasing unapproved alternatives and providing information on why the sewer plant should not be moved up the hill,” Roberts wrote in the memo to Fritts, which the council president shared with members of the governing body during a meeting on Oct. 9 and which the Examiner obtained through an Open Public Records Act request.
During the meeting, council members and Westfall went back and forth on the matter with Fritts, saying at one point that “the only thing that matters is when is the plant going to be built” and Westfall saying of his actions, “I have pursued other options if I thought it would save us money. We have spent between $300,000 and $400,000 on the design (of the new treatment plant) in the last few years.”
Westfall responded to Roberts’ memo in an Oct. 9 letter to Borough Attorney Greg Cannon in which he said, in part, that in May, after bids for the new waste water treatment plant had been rejected by the council, “The Borough Council chose to abandon the pre-existing, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection-approved $240,000 design and develop a package plant design.
“This is the second time in four years the council has abandoned a sewer plant design and decided to start over again on design. This borough is being bamboozled by doing another package plant design.
“At the June 12, 2018, Borough Council meeting, the borough engineer described a ‘package plant’ as ‘simply a design of new treatment units that have a small footprint with high intensity treatment. They can all be placed in a small area or not, depending on the available space,’ ” the mayor wrote.
Although Westfall said some consideration was given to placing the new treatment plant at “an upland location outside of the current location of the plant for a variety of reasons, … at no time did I or Borough Council authorize Roberts Engineering to ‘calculate costs of movement of the treatment plant up the hill.’ ”
Westfall wrote that “the borough engineer has stated that the deed for the land on the upland location adjoining the current plant operation ‘that a waste water treatment facility could not be constructed in that area.’ Upon my review and contact with the Green Acres representative, I have received written confirmation that there is no restriction on the use of this area for construction of a waste water treatment facility.
“As mayor, I have a responsibility to check out options that will save borough taxpayers on construction and long-term operation of the plant. This is what I did and, much to my dismay and disappointment, there were false answers given to me regarding this planning alternative which would have had the potential to save the borough taxpayer both during construction and future operation of the plant,” Westfall wrote in his Oct. 9 letter.