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Date: 1/3/2023
AMHERST/HADLEY – Amherst will receive a $155,000 grant for the purpose of finalizing design work for a shared sewer with Hadley. The grant was awarded through the Energy & Regionalization program of the Community Compact Cabinet, a Massachusetts initiative to strengthen partnerships between the state and municipalities founded in 2015.
Amherst Superintendent of Public Works Guilford Mooring said that the two towns have been collaborating for some time and are now considering merging their wastewater streams to take advantage of Amherst’s superior treatment facility.
“We’ve been working with Hadley for a pretty long time, and we have a memorandum of understanding [MOU] with them to work on different things in water and wastewater. Hadley was having an issue with the capacity of their wastewater plant and they were looking at either upgrading their plant or possibly sending some of their wastewater flow to the Amherst plant. Our plant was built as a regional facility and we have some excess capacity,” Mooring said.
The grant is simply to fund the design and survey tasks to plan the project. The project itself will be funded separately if it comes to fruition.
“The grant will look at finalizing the design we came up with; we have a conceptual design that pumps water from Hadley about a mile and a half route to Amherst and then have it go into the Amherst wastewater treatment plant. Once the plan is done, the grant will pay for things like the final survey, we’ll also do some soil boring because we think there’s a few big rocks along the way we’re going past, and then we’ll also do some final design work with the pumps of the existing pump station to make sure they can actually handle the flow,” Mooring said.
This research will be provided to Hadley to guide their choice
“Once we have all this information, then Hadley can make a decision whether to go try to find money to install this connection or proceed with upgrading their plant, or maybe they proceed with this installation and then later on they proceed with upgrading their plant,” Mooring said. “We’ll be done with our work definitely by the end of summer [2023], and then Hadley can decide which route they want to go.”
A 2019 conceptual estimate placed the cost of the project around $2 million, but due to the coronavirus pandemic’s effect on the global supply chain and rising inflation, this figure will most likely change post-research.
As evidenced by the title of the program providing the grant, this project will be centered around regionalization, a concept which Mooring said is beneficial to communities both financially and in terms of environmental sustainability.
“New England is very independent, the communities are very independent, but this grant is trying to leverage what some communities have to provide more for other communities. That’s really all [regionalization] is about; helping communities share resources so that some communities don’t have to build as much or spend as much to have the exact same thing that the community next door to them has. In a sense, this is just helping provide services to all members of the commonwealth in a way that’s more efficient and cost-effective,” Mooring said. “From the fact that you only have place where you’re treating the wastewater, that’s one [environmental] benefit…It’s only one plant, you get efficiencies in power, you get efficiencies in equipment usage, so it’s usually much better to have a bigger plant that serves a small area, instead of having lots of small plants that each serve a smaller area.”
Mooring said that Amherst and Hadley residents can expect to see people out surveying and soil boring over the coming months, and that the Hadley Select Board will be informed to make decision within the year.
“What to expect is we’ll get the grant soon, we haven’t got the paperwork yet, and as soon as we get the paperwork people will see people out surveying, we’ll do soil boring like I said, and then probably by the end of summer or sometime in late July to early August we’ll have a plan that we’ll probably present to the Select Board in Hadley, and see if they want to proceed further with it,” Mooring said.