Two water districts get state notices for pollution violations

Two El Paso County water districts have been given notices of violation by the state for releasing pollutants from sewage treatment plants into streams.

Paint Brush Hills and Cherokee metropolitan districts operate lagoon plants, an older method of treating sewage. Sewage is stored in ponds, where aeration and chemical processes remove contaminants.

Paint Brush Hills' plant serves about 12,000 customers in the Falcon area. Cherokee serves about 18,000 just east of Colorado Springs.

Neither district's violations were connected with threats to drinking wells or aquatic life.

In the more recent violation, by Paint Brush Hills, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment on May 5 ordered the district to make improvements to its plant or face fines of up to $10,000 a day.

According to the violation notice, the plant exceeded monthly average limits on the release of biochemical oxygen demand - the amount of dissolved oxygen in water - in seven months since January 2008. The plant also violated fecal coliform standards in December 2007 and chlorine standards in January 2009 and lacked enough pH, or acidity, in releases in August 2008. The releases were into an unnamed tributary of Black Squirrel Creek.

The violation notice requires the district to submit plans for improvements to the plant and to have construction completed by Dec. 31, 2010, or show an engineer's report proving releases from the plant were anomalies and pollution levels can be controlled by the facility.

"I don't think we're going to be satisfied with a report that says this is an anomaly, because they have a history of non-compliance," said Ginny Torrez, environmental protection specialist with the state, referring to another violation she said occurred about six years ago. "I think at this point we are looking for them to look at some type of upgrade that is going to result in fairly long-term compliance."

The district, in its response to the state, said unusually high temperatures in December 2007 caused lagoon "turnover," when biological growth in the pond floats to the top, which caused several of the high measurements. The other problems were blamed on operator error.

The district operates the plant with Woodmen Hills Metropolitan District, but Paint Brush Hills was given the notice of violation because it is the permit holder.

Environmental attorney Connie King, representing Paint Brush Hills, said district officials believe they have addressed the problems by arranging to divert sewage from the Meridian Ranch neighborhood to another district's treatment plant and by cleaning, relining and re-piping the lagoon that caused the problems.

King said the district is still negotiating with the state and awaiting engineering study results before deciding how to address what the state says is a need for upgrades at the plant.

"At this point, I don't think there's any indication that it would be necessary to build a new wastewater treatment plant to comply with the current permit limits," King said.

In the other recent violation, Cherokee Metropolitan District was fined $80,082 in April for discharges of chlorine, organic compounds and fecal coliform into the East Fork of Sand Creek from 2006 to 2008.

District manager Kip Petersen said hot temperatures caused similar problems with Cherokee's lagoons, which led to the highest fines the district has paid the state.

"They're allowing me to pay it over three years, so that was generous of them. Still it's a big nut and that really bothered me," said Petersen. "I just felt it was a large penalty for something that was not necessarily within our control."

Cherokee is building a new sewage treatment plant, expected to be running next year, which uses machines, not ponds, to decontaminate sewage.

Despite the problems with sewage lagoons, as many as one third of Colorado's cities and sewage districts still use the systems. Torrez said more districts are replacing them as water-quality standards for releases from plants continue to get more strict.