The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) may require the city of Kewanee to spend as much as $10 million to remove a chemical from the water the city discharges from its wastewater treatment plant.
City Manager Gary Bradley said at Monday’s City Council meeting that the city couldn’t afford that without a substantial grant or loan from the state.
And Bradley said the chemical becomes diluted in the west branch of the Spoon River, where the treatment plant discharges. Within a couple of hundred feet of the discharge point, Bradley said, the concentration of the chemical is below the state limit.
The chemical is called chloride, and the water Kewanee pumps from its four wells has an excessive level of it, according to the IEPA.
At Monday’s council meeting, Scott DeSplinter of the engineering firm of Crawford, Murphy and Tilly explained a possible plan for lowering the level of chlorides sent into the creek.
The plan involves drilling several shallower wells, which would produce low-chloride water, and using that water to dilute the water going to the treatment plant.
After quizzing DeSplinter at length, council members voted to hire his firm to prepare a plan for the project, for a fee of $172,500.
DeSplinter said Galva has much shallower wells than Kewanee, and their water doesn’t have high chloride levels. That suggests that if Kewanee goes with the shallower wells, it could solve the problem.
Mayor Gary Moore asked DeSplinter what the consequences would be if the city ignored the IEPA and did nothing about the chlorides.
DeSplinter said that ultimately, “They’re just going to force you to do it anyway.”
“And that’s why we need a loan” to pay for the project,” Bradley said. “It’s not reasonable to expect us to do this on our own without any assistance.”
The city would have to prove it can’t take on the project on its own before the state would step in with a loan, Bradley said.
Bradley said he has suggested to the IEPA that the project isn’t needed because the chlorides become diluted in the creek soon after they’re discharged. So far, he said, the state officials haven’t relented in their insistence that Kewanee remove the chemical.
