[B]URLINGTON — City officials are taking steps to avoid more unexpected discharges of partially treated wastewater and stormwater into Lake Champlain that plagued the city last summer.
The City Council approved Monday increased staffing in the Water Resources Division of the Department of Public Works. The city has also taken some interim steps following the November passage of a $30 million bond for upgrades to wastewater treatment plants, pump stations, stormwater outfalls and pipes.
Larger-scale construction funded by the bond is set to start this fall and winter, according to Mayor Miro Weinberger. The staffing increase is meant to help avoid a repeat of last summer’s issues.
“We have a similar underinvestment, a longstanding chronic underinvestment, in our human capital that is a complement to the infrastructure investment,” he said. “We need to make an additional investment with people if we are going to steward, manage, update and maintain these technical, complex water systems.”
DPW’s Water Resources Division will add three positions, reclassify three other positions and increase pay for the division’s director to make the position’s pay more competitive with similar positions elsewhere.
The typical customer — a single family home using 600 cubic feet of water a month — will see an increase of $20 a year on their water/wastewater bill as a result of the staffing changes approved by the council Monday and the addition of two more positions in an anticipated second phase of the staffing increases.
Staffing Increase Details
The increased staffing recommendations follow an assessment by utility and public-sector consultant Raftelis.
“Although Water Resources effectively executes its mission on a day-to-day basis, the Assessment Team noted several performance gaps, which will be exacerbated as the utility’s capital and compliance programs grow over the next few years,” the report states.
These performance gaps include a lack of regular preventative maintenance, a lack of resources for water quality program development and execution, scheduling issues at water treatment plants and understaffing in customer service, billing and engineering.
The assessment found that the division should have a total of 45-47.5 employees, up from the 43 current staffers. Ratelis found that resources were not properly allocated, with too many resources going toward after-hours water treatment plant operations and construction and not enough resources allocated to preventative maintenance, engineering and compliance.
To address these challenges, the consultant recommended a more substantial increase in the short term to a peak of 49 FTE employees, which would be reduced to the 45-47.5 goal level through attrition.
The plan approved by the City Council adds a customer care representative, a water resources engineer and a stormwater program coordinator. Three other positions are being reclassified, and the “assistant director of water resources” position will be reclassified as the “division director of water resources” with a pay increase to make the position more in-line with national figures.
Megan Moir, the water resources division head, told the City Council April 15 that she would not be asking for increased staffing if it wasn’t necessary.
“Without this additional staffing, I have very strong concerns about my ability, and my existing staff’s ability, to keep the ship moving forward and to weather the next possible thing I do not know will happen when it happens,” Moir said.
Weinberger said the unexpected discharges from last summer show what can go wrong if the city doesn’t have proper staffing in the wastewater division.
“Because we are under resourced in terms of staff, a lot of the operations are reactive, we have gaps in our proactive preventative maintenance efforts,” he said. “When you chronically underinvest and do not complete preventive maintenance tasks, that leads to errors, and under-maintained equipment breaking, and unplanned discharges.”
City Council Discussions
The council voted unanimously to approve the staffing increases. The approval Monday comes two weeks after a lively debate about the proposal at an April 15 meeting where the council voted to postpone action. The council voted 8-4 to delay after councilors said they wanted more time for public input and expressed concerns about the cost of the increase.
DPW is working to hire a financial consultant to study alternative rate structures for water and wastewater for small-volume, income-constrained users, following a September 2018 City Council resolution. The department updated its resolution to commit to bringing a proposal forward by March 2020 in response to comments from the council.
Other Steps
Last summer, there were four unplanned discharges of partially treated stormwater and wastewater into Lake Champlain. System breakdowns, including a faulty valve, problems with sewage-digesting microbes and a computer failure, during heavy rains lead to millions of gallons of discharge into the lake.
Last November, 92 percent of Burlingtonians voted for the $30 million wastewater bond. The average Burlington family will pay $5 a month more on their water bills after five years to pay for the upgrades, and since property tax-exempt institutions pay water bills, they will contribute to funding these upgrades.
“We’ve taken a number of interim steps to … try to ensure that we have a very different summer this year than last year,” Weinberger said.
The city will continue the enhanced staffing during wet weather events that it started last year and has created more redundancies in the way the sewage treatment plant works by rewiring computer systems and putting additional steps in place. Weinberger said there has also been work on the biological health of the plants.
“You have all that kind of interim work that’s in place preparing us for the upcoming warmer months, and simultaneously there’s all kinds of planning and contracting going on so that once we get through the summer, fall and upcoming winter, you’ll start to see the large-scale investment of the $30 million bonds,” he said.
The city also received $1 million in federal funding to help pay for the upgrades.
Weinberger said he was optimistic this summer would be better than last year.
“We continue to improve, we’re way better than we used to be, we’re going to take another big step in the improvement with a large scale investment that is going to start later in the season, but there’s a lot that can still go wrong,” he said.
