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St. Petersburg officials hope for a faster fix to sewage problems by 2018

 
Published Sept. 20, 2016

ST. PETERSBURG — Last week, Mayor Rick Kriseman told residents in a video posted to YouTube that the city's sewage woes won't be fixed until 2018. That's when the city hopes to finish expanding capacity at the Southwest wastewater treatment plant and implementing other major upgrades to the sewer system.

But in August — before Hurricane Hermine caused St. Petersburg to dump tens of millions of gallons of sewage into Tampa Bay — the city gave a more pessimistic projection to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection: 2019.

So how did a three-year project suddenly become a two-year job?

St. Petersburg Public Works Administrator Claude Tankersley said Monday that the engineering firm hired to design the improvements, Brown and Caldwell, believes it can finish the design work faster than first thought. Thus, the city will push whichever builder is hired to finish the project by the summer of 2018.

But until then, St. Petersburg will be vulnerable to the same conditions — torrential rains, aging sewers and reduced capacity — that led the city to release 151 million gallons of sewage into streets, waterways, Boca Ciega Bay and Tampa Bay.

"We expect noticeable improvements to our system within two years," Kriseman said in the video. "But it will take at least that long before we see major changes in how our wastewater is treated in extreme situations."

City Council member Karl Nurse believes the sewer upgrades need to be done even faster than that. He wants the expansion of the Southwest plant finished by June 2018, hopefully in time for that year's rainy season.

He hopes Kriseman's vow to fix things by 2018 holds true.

"I sure don't want to go through five summers of this," Nurse said.

Meanwhile, city officials as of Monday had not yet selected an independent firm to investigate why neither the mayor nor City Council knew about a consultant's 2014 study that predicted the ongoing sewage crisis. That study, conducted by Brown and Caldwell, concluded that shutting down the Albert Whitted wastewater treatment plant in 2015 could lead to sewage overflows during heavy rains.

That revelation was part of a whistleblower report provided Friday by Craven Askew, the chief operator of the city's Northeast wastewater treatment plant.

Brown and Caldwell, a national consulting company, did not return requests for comment made to its Tampa office.

The firm's $94,000 study was never vetted by council members, city council staff and members said, because it fell beneath the $100,000 threshold for council members to formally vote on items. The study was included with dozens of other small-scale expenses included in a February 2014 monthly procurement report.

The study didn't have any explanation other than the Feb. 25 expense was for Brown and Caldwell for "SWWRF Capacity and Liquid Treatment." SWWRF stands for Southwest Water Reclamation Facility, the sewer plant's formal name.

"If you didn't know what to look for," Nurse said, "you'd never know it was there."

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Nurse said he didn't know about the study and it's possible the mayor's office didn't know about it either. But he said the public works administrator or someone in the Water Resources Department must have known about it.

If city council members had known about the study, Nurse said, he doubts they would have allowed the city to close the Albert Whitted plant.

"Surely we wouldn't have closed it if we had any idea that we couldn't handle a storm," he said.

The city's public works administrator in 2014, Mike Connors, declined to speak to Tampa Bay Times reporters on Monday.

Current Water Resources director Steve Leavitt did not return a request for comment either. After Askew's whistleblower report, Kriseman said he would order a management review of Leavitt's department.

The sewage crisis will also be the focus of today's 3 p.m. meeting of the Pinellas County legislative delegation. State Sen. Jack Latvala, R.-Clearwater, will lead a discussion of lawmakers and local and state officials at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.

On Monday, Latvala wrote to Kriseman asking the mayor to include in his presentation information about how the city could use temporary barges or other floating structures to store sewage and avoid dumping into the bay after another storm. The mayor's office said they have mulled over the idea and will address it.

The city has budgeted $38 million in its upcoming budget and more than $100 million over the next five years. Latvala said he understood those fixes are in the pipeline, but wants short-term solutions to avoid more environmental damage and human health risks.

"Do we sit by and continue to watch these discharges happen during every major rain event until those projects are completed?" Latvala wrote.

Contact Charlie Frago at cfrago@tampabay.com or (727)893-8459. Follow@CharlieFrago.