Bradenton outsources wastewater treatment plant operations to address pollution woes
Bradenton will outsource operations and maintenance of its troubled wastewater treatment plant, which has a history of deficient operations and sewage discharges into the Manatee River.
Problems with Bradenton's wastewater treatment plant and pipeline system have caused the release of hundreds of millions of gallons of sewage into the Manatee River over the years — particularly during times of heavy rainfall or during major storms like Hurricane Debby last year.
The discharges prompted environmentalists to file a lawsuit that ended in a 2022 settlement. Advocates claimed that the city had discharged 160 million gallons of sewage into the Manatee River between 2018 and 2021. Those issues have continued since, particularly during the 2024 hurricane season.
Plans to outsource operations are meant as a step toward addressing those issues. The move is also supported by advocacy groups who prevailed in the litigation.
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"Our administrator, our chief operating officer and the mayor should not be managing something that they don't know about," Bradenton Mayor Gene Brown told the Herald-Tribune. "We're not professionals in that, and these people are professionals. We've had a lot of retirements. We've had great people there, but they've aged out and there's not a lot of people that we can find that can manage this. These people have the management capability.
"Our engineers do a great job for the city, but they have the whole city to engineer, and we wanted to bring in a specific company to operate that," he said. "That's their only job: to make it better."
Environmental advocates who pressed the litigation against Bradenton praised the decision as a positive step toward compliance with environmental protection directives.
"We are very supportive of that; we think that is a smart and responsible move," Suncoast Waterkeeper Founder Justin Bloom told the Herald-Tribune. "They have had some setbacks and uneven progress over the last two years that they have been operating under our settlement agreement, but I think that they are heading in the right direction. Bring in a third party is a really big step towards achieving compliance, which is the goal."
There are two aspects of wastewater management that have troubled Bradenton for years: technology limitations and workforce issues at the wastewater management plant and an aging city sewage pipeline system.
City Administrator Rob Perry told the City Council that outsourcing wastewater treatment plant operations to engineering firm Woodard and Curran will not only benefit the wastewater treatment plant, but allow in-house staff to focus on water infiltration into the city's pipeline system during heavy rainfall.
"You've heard me talk endlessly about inflow and infiltration, and that has to be addressed," Perry said. "That's basically out in the streets, homes and community of the city. It involves a system of transmission lines, lift stations and manholes that have been aged themselves and allow water to penetrate and really over capacitate our system. We want to focus on that."
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He added that the outside engineering firm has "a great deal of automated technology that is utilized in today's modern collection system…. Technology is really important."
Brown said the city staff that currently works at the wastewater treatment plant will have opportunity to become employees of the company and continue to work at the treatment plant. Only 11 of 17 positions are currently filled, and seven of those employees were hired within then past six months.
He also said that the city will work with the firm to make capital improvements at the plant, although the agreement includes outsourcing of regular maintenance.
One major effort includes construction of a new 900-foot-deep Class V underground injection well to dispose of excess reclaimed water from the sewage treatment process underground into the Upper Floridian Aquifer, rather than into the Manatee River.
The effort is to comply with with a bill approved by the Florida Legislature in 2021 that requires the Department of Environmental Protection to eliminate wastewater discharges into surface waters. Utilities have until Jan. 1, 2032 to fully comply.
"It's reclaimed water, it's fully treated and at that point its drinkable," Brown said. "Every place has to be out of the waterways by 2032. Everybody in the state has that permit, you have to discharge somewhere.
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"Right now if it's fully reclaimed it can go in the river, but by 2032 you can't do that so we've been working on permits and all that, and it's been in construction for a while," he said.
"Its another step toward the environmental protection of surface waters," Bloom said. "Not that injecting treated wastewater into the aquifer is necessarily a good thing, it's just kind of the lesser of two evils."
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Bradenton outsources wastewater treatment plant operations
