Citizen groups Tennessee Clean Water Network and Watershed Association of the Tellico Reservoir have issued a 60-day notice of intent to sue Madisonville regarding alleged Clean Water Act violations.
The notice comes about a month after Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation Commissioner Robert Martineau Jr. filed an order for city representatives to develop a new corrective action plan to get the treatment plant back into compliance.
“Our concern when we saw the TDEC order, while it’s a relatively strong order for TDEC, we thought the penalties were too low and the solution to the problem was more open ended than what we wanted to see,” Stephanie Matheny, TCWN attorney, said. “So that’s when we decided that we wanted to send our own notice letter to preserve our ability to be part of the process of fixing this problem.”
Martineau’s order called for city officials to pay an up-front civil penalty of $22,000, or half through proposing a supplemental environmental project, and pay $1,396 in damages to the Division of Water Resources within 30 days of the order’s receipt. The order also required Madisonville to submit a corrective action plan within 60 days, finish the plan by Aug. 31, 2015, and be in compliance by March 31, 2016. Failure to comply will result in fines of $12,400 or $15,600 based on stipulations in the order.
Per the notice of intent, from May 2009 to May 2014 Madisonville has reported more than 5,200 days of violations of numeric effluent limits, and 136 overflows resulting in “millions of gallons of untreated sewage” pumped into area streams. Eleven overflows were reported from January to May. The past three years include 17, 19 and 33 overflows, from 2011-2013, respectively.
Bill Waldrop, chairman of the Water Quality Improvement Committee, said a “red flag” was raised after he learned about Madisonville’s intent to flow effluent into Tellico Lake just one-tenth of a mile from Tellico Reservoir Development Agency’s output. Effluent is currently discharged into Bat Creek at mile marker 19.3. The water quality committee works in association with WATeR.
“Seven years ago they came up with a corrective action plan, and the beat’s still going on, just as before,” Waldrop said. “So we hope that the order will trigger a change in attitude, put some resource into this thing and start taking the permit seriously and if you do, we’re not going to follow through with the suit. But if they don’t, we feel that something has to be done.”
Waldrop said the notice of intent was a way to see how Madisonville would react to Martineu’s order.
TDEC Deputy Communications Officer Eric Ward said there were no updates at this time.
“They need to need to fix their problems and they need to do it quickly, and there needs to be some more significant penalties for the long-term chronic violations that they’ve had,” Matheny said. “They have made an economic choice that had cost them less to keep violating than to fix the problem and that needs to be recouped.” Matheny said under the Clean Water Act violations can tally up to $37,500 per day per violation, and with an alleged more than 5,200 days of violations there could be a “huge penalty.”
“One of the things we would look for in any agreement is enforceable deadlines for fixing the problem because ... this is an entity that has had deadlines in the past that have slipped, so there would need to be serious consequences for failing to fix the problem in the timeline that would be agreed to,” Matheny said.
Madisonville Mayor Glenn Moser could not be reached for comment. Engineering firm McGill Associates Principal Gary McGill, referred by Madisonville Sewer Manager Charlie Atkins, could not be reached for comment. Atkins had not seen the notice of intent and recommended speaking to McGill for updates on the treatment plant. Officials have until Sept. 29 before a lawsuit is filed, Matheny said.
“We don’t want to drag this thing out through court,” Waldrop said. “We want to see some changes, but this is contingency planning. If they don’t do anything, if they continue business as usual, something’s got to change. Somebody’s got to make them do it. TDEC has been ineffective.”
