With time and options running out, Magnolia aldermen on Monday looked at taking the first steps to reroute the city’s wastewater to McComb’s treatment plant.
The town sends its sewage to two lagoons, but that’s an older process to treat wastewater that has fallen out of favor with environmental regulators, who instead prefer the use of treatment plants.
McComb built its plant in 2009 with the intention of selling treatment services to area municipalities, including Magnolia.
At Monday’s work session, Mayor Anthony Witherspoon emphasized the need for Magnolia to possibly reroute its wastewater supply from the two lagoons to the McComb facility.
Witherspoon will be meeting with regional directors of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Atlanta this week, where he hopes to get information on possible financing options. The mayor hopes to come up with design plans that he can bring back to aldermen for review.
The current use of lagoon water has become “expensive” and is “an antiquated way to deal with wastewater,” the mayor said.
The city is working with Neel-Schaffer Engineering to come up with a plan to pay for a way to send wastewater to McComb.
Regardless of what they come up with, the town will likely need to build infrastructure to get the wastewater to the plant in south McComb. And Magnolia will have to pay McComb a recurring fee for treating the wastewater.
“We are going to have to deal with growing, unfunded mandates from MDEQ,” Witherspoon said. “There’s some design plans that were put together by Neel-Schaffer to coordinate the wastewater treatment plant in McComb, that is regional in design.”
The city must act in order to comply with requirements from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality that the lagoons can no longer meet, said Keith Lott of Neel-Schaffer.
“The goal is to do this before the current situation we have becomes detrimental. It’s going to need to be done. That’s the bottom line,” he said.
Alderman Lonnie Cox asked about the possibility of securing a grant.
“That’s one of the things I’ll be looking into,” Witherspoon said.
If Magnolia can muster a deal with McComb, it’ll be the only area municipality having its wastewater treated at the $34 million plant.
Summit officials had originally discussed sending sewage to McComb, but officials from the two cities could never come to terms. Summit instead built its own $3 million wastewater treatment plant, which went into service last month, leaving McComb without one source of revenue to pay for the plant that it had all but counted on.
Meanwhile, officials from McComb and Pike County are working on infrastructure to connect the new Gateway Industrial Park to the McComb plant.
In another matter, with the goal of reducing solid waste by up to 25 percent, Magnolia aldermen are considering an interlocal agreement with Pike County and its municipalities to continue a recycling initiative that began last year.
Grant money from the MDEQ will expire in June, leading city and county officials to consider putting up an estimated cost of $82,000 in funding to continue pick-up and disposal of recyclable solid waste, and to build a compactor for all participating municipalities to use.
Magnolia, Summit and Osyka would pay 10 percent of the cost, while McComb and Pike County would split the remaining 90 percent. This would result in approximately $4,800 in costs for Magnolia, the mayor said.
The goal is to reduce the amount of recyclable solid waste that goes into the landfill by up to 25 percent, Witherspoon said.
“This is one way to work with our neighbors and to better the community,” he said, calling educational outreach the key to the program’s success.
