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South Union Township supervisors dissolve sewage authority

By Steve Ferris sferris@heraldstandard.Com 3 min read

The South Union Township supervisors adopted a resolution dissolving the township sewage authority on Wednesday, a day after the authority board voted to disband.

Supervisors unanimously voted in favor of the resolution at a special meeting in the morning and then started consolidating the authority’s and the township’s operations.

The supervisors started the process of converting the authority’s bank accounts to township accounts and met with the authority’s four employees who will become township employees, said Robert Schiffbauer, chairman of the board of supervisors.

“Changing accounts, meeting with personnel … We already started directing the maintenance staff,” Schiffbauer said after the meeting.

He said the supervisors and the authority board members discussed the consolidation and agreed that the supervisors were better able to repair and maintain the sewage system because they are on the job everyday and know the problems in the system.

“I think we were on the same page with this,” Schiffbauer said. “We will have the five-day-a-week supervision and direction from the board of supervisors. This is not something that is new to us. We probably know just as much as the authority did about what was going on in the sewage system.”

Using the township’s equipment and manpower and authority’s two maintenance workers, the supervisors will reduce costs, but contractors might have to be hired for some of the more technical work, he said. The only equipment the authority owns is a pick-up truck with a manhole hoist attachment, he added.

Schiffbauer said having Jason Scott as a fellow supervisor is one of the reasons the supervisors are confident they can manage the system.

He said Scott, who worked for a family-owned excavation business that did a lot of work for the authority before he became a supervisor in 2013, will be able to direct and oversee work on the system.

Scott said most of the work he did in the 20 years he worked for the business was for the authority.

“Over the years I’ve seen where the problems lie,” Scott said.

He said water has been infiltrating sewage lines since the system was installed in the 1960s, and it is the biggest problem in the system. Water that enters sewage lines ends up getting treated along with sewage at the Greater Uniontown Joint Sewage Authority Plant. Some repairs have been made, but none of them have fixed the problem, Scott said.

“A lot of water is getting into the system. It creates problems for us and the Greater Uniontown sewage plant that treats it,” Scott said.

Fixing the problem is his main priority.

“The infiltration of the system is first. We have to stop this water. We have manholes popping off when rain gets in the system. We can definitely move it on a faster pace to fix these problems that we have,” Scott said.

Another problem is flooding in Heritage Hills, Duck Hollow and other areas, he said.

He commended the authority for removing a problematic pump station on Glenn Avenue and for recently hiring a contractor to rebuild a pump station on Route 21. The two other pump stations in the system are located in Salem Heights and Valley View.

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