Jun 24, 2002 By Steve Ferris 4 min read

Over the years, Fayette County, municipalities have had many opportunities to build shared or regional water and sewage service facilities, according to Bob Softcheck. In fact, the idea of centralized utilities has been around at least since the 1970s, but it has never been embraced, he said.

Today, as municipalities are planning and building sewer systems to serve their own communities, an effort is afoot to gain support for regional treatment facilities in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Softcheck, general manager of the North Fayette County Municipal Authority, served on a Pennsylvania Economy League (PEL) steering committee that conducted a two-year study into the region’s water and sewer infrastructures.

The “Investing in Clean Water” study, done at the request of the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, concludes that regional sewer systems would operate more cost effectively than smaller municipal facilities, reduce the amount of sewage entering rivers and streams and attract businesses to the area.

The goal of the study is to develop support to seek federal funding to plan regional water and sewer systems to attract businesses to southwestern Pennsylvania and reduce the flow of sewage into area waterways.

“In southwestern Pennsylvania, we’re losing business because of the lack of sewage at existing buildings,” said Mike Krajovic of Fay-Penn Economic Development Council. “You can’t market without it. (Businesses) expect it. They demand it.”

Krajovic joined Harold D. Miller and Ken Zapinski, president and vice president, respectively, of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, in a recent discussion about the study with the Herald-Standard Editorial Board.

“There’s no way to attract business without sewage (service),” Miller said.

While Softcheck supports the effort to seek federal assistance for planning, he doubts regionalization will become a reality in Fayette County.

“I don’t see it coming,” Softcheck said. “The opportunities have been there. They’re all building their own little plants. I still think there is a way, but it’s going to take a lot of cooperation.”

He said some municipalities seem content to operate their own sewage systems. Others have tried to build systems large enough to accommodate future expansion into a neighboring municipality, but state and federal funding agencies won’t provide money for such endeavors.

Miller said funding agencies encourage municipalities to form joint sewage authorities, but few municipalities seem willing to work together.

Joe Simatic, Southwestern Pennsylvania Water Authority manager, said cooperation among municipalities is an attainable goal, if elected officials could put aside their political differences.

Simatic also served on the steering committee and believes in the idea of regionalization.

“Yes, it is attainable,” Simatic said. “Our approach is that it’s cheaper to put a distribution line in the ground than build a plant. Big business has some apprehension about these small systems. Let’s face it, in Fayette and Greene (counties) we need to make things as attractive as possible.”

The PEL study says that the western Pennsylvania watershed is the most reliable source of water in the United States, but the region also has the unfortunate distinction of having the most severe problem of sewage overflowing from combined sewer systems in the country.

Combined sewer systems, like the one in Uniontown, channel storm water and sewage through shared pipes to sewage treatment plants. They are permitted by the state Department of Environmental Protection.

By design, these systems discharge both runoff and sewage into streams or rivers during storms with heavy rains.

Pennsylvania leads the nation with 1,671 combined sewer overflows, according to the PEL report. Ohio is a close second with 1,507 and New York is third with 1,075. Almost half, or 755, of the state’s combined sewers are in southwestern Pennsylvania, the report states.

Contamination from combined sewers, malfunctioning on-lot septic systems and wildcat sewers, which discharge untreated sewage into streams and roadside ditches, made the rivers in Pittsburgh the most unsafe for human contact in the Ohio River Basin in 2000 and 2001.

In southwestern Pennsylvania, 300,000 homes are not connected to public sewers and as many as 27,000 homes discharge untreated sewage into ditches and streams. Much of the region’s soil is clay and shale, which are not suitable for traditional septic systems.

State-imposed tap-in restrictions at older sewage treatment plants and the absence of water and sewer infrastructure at 35 percent of the interchanges on major highways are blocking business development, the study said.

The study estimates that it will cost more than $10 billion to repair and upgrade exiting sewers, install new systems, upgrade septic systems, expand water infrastructure and building infrastructure for business in southwestern Pennsylvania.

“We’ve estimated it’s a $10 billion problem,” Miller said.