Amador County – Ione City Council on Tuesday will consider delaying selection of an engineer for its sewer plant Report of Waste Discharge and other work as state deadlines loom.

Ione City Attorney James Maynard in a report said Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board “has conditionally approved the plan outlined in the Seepage Discharge Compliance Plan, a plan that is intended to minimize the burden of any rate increase on Ione’s residents.” He said “the plan also gives the city additional time to explore use of the tertiary plant, whether in addition to the current effluent flows from ARSA and CDCR or in replacement of that flow.”

Regional Board commented on the Seepage Plan in a Feb. 16 letter, Maynard said, and the “city faces an upcoming deadline … to respond to concerns raised.” Robertson-Bryan Incorporated “submitted responses to the technical questions and the City must prepare a response providing further clarification” to three other questions. He said RBI answered most of the questions in its addendum.

The remaining question to be answered by March 16 “regarding compliance with dates in the (Cease and Desist Order), is almost wholly dependent on the outcome of the upcoming hearing at the Regional Board at which the City will ask for an extension of time to prepare the Report of Waste Discharge,” Maynard said.

Councilman David Plank said the Request for Proposals (RFP) has gone out for a sewer engineer to finish the Report of Waste Discharge, and only one firm had submitted a proposal as of Monday. The city Wastewater Committee on Tuesday will ask for an extension of the RFP deadline, and ask for the city to select an engineer at its April 3 meeting, Maynard said.

He said it is hoped the Regional Board will grant an extension to the required responses in the Cease and Desist Order. The Regional Board has “asked the city to prepare a new scope of work and compliance schedule as the city is well behind the schedule outlined in the Seepage Discharge Compliance Plan.”

Maynard said the Regional Board “asked that the city obtain proof of raw sewage contamination at the bottom of both Pond 5 and Pond 6 through pond bottom sampling.” He said “significantly, Board staff has sufficient confidence in the science underlying RBI’s Seepage Plan that they have not asked for the sampling to be done until submission of the Report of Waste Discharge, currently slated for May 30.” He said, though, that it was “understood” the Council would prefer sampling soon to confirm that the project as proposed in the Seepage Plan “will solve the City’s problems.”

Story by Jim Reece This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.