PARIS — State regulators have given the Paris Utility District a little over four years to devise a plan to stop treating excess stormwater.

The scenario arises very seldomly but by 2019, the district must find an alternative to pumping rainwater from roads and catch basins that overflows from massive, 1.7-million-gallon storage tanks to its treatment facility. There, inorganic solids settle out of the stormwater, and are mixed with sanitized wastewater from homes and businesses and discharged into the Little Androscoggin River. 

The deadline given to the PUD has nudged it to work together with town officials to close catch basins where rainwater pools before flowing through its network of pipes. That water, according to plant manager Steve Arnold, is not central to the district’s mission of treating sewage from their customers’ homes and businesses, and results in increased costs to some 900 ratepayers.

“The only thing that should be going into our system is if it comes out of a human body,” Arnold said. 

Under its new license agreement with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, the PUD has been tasked with closing its combined sewer overflow, which is essentially an area where stormwater builds up before it flows into tanks, pools, and overflow is discharged, toward the plant. 

“We support it; why should we treat rainwater? It increases our operational costs and takes away from our ability to help our customers,” he said. “We’re not here to treat gasoline; we’re here to treat sanitary waste. That’s why it’s illegal to dump things into the sewer system.” 

Failure to comply could result in penalties, including fines.

A call to a DEP spokesperson was not returned Monday afternoon. 

The rainwater receives a primary treatment where solids are separated out. It passes through the plant’s comprehensive biological and chemical sanitation process. 

Arnold thought the last time an overflow occurred was in 2012, when approximately 12 inches of rain fell over three days. Such storms, he said, are very infrequent. 

Identifying the source of the stormwater overflow is key to preventing it from entering the system. Arnold said it comes from catch basins, roadway stormwater drains, gutters from old houses and floor drains from garages. 

While the issue has been on the PUD’s radar “for some time,” Arnold said, he has contacted Town Manager Amy Bernard to advise her of the situation and the two of them are working with their respective boards to come up with a solution.

Several possibilities are being floated, including asking the state to tap into its network of pipes that send excess stormwater to a large detention pond behind the Western Maine Community College on Main Street. Another solution would be to build such a collection point somewhere in town.  

“Rather than dumping it directly into the sewer system, you would divert it to an area where it would evaporate,” Arnold said. 

The scope of the project would involve 18 catch basins in the downtown village area. Bernard said she was leery of the costs of any potential work and wanted to speak with state regulators before any decision is made. 

She said it was suggested to her two years ago that installing a new detention pond could cost $20 million, while only benefiting residents living downtown. 

“It doesn’t seem fair asking two-thirds of the town to subsidize another one-third. I don’t know how to fix that, but we’ll listen to the DEP and see what other towns have done,” Bernard said. 

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