By Richard Hebert and Bonnie Posick
Research by Kyle Rich
West Haven residents have been vocal about the city’s revaluation of their property and the impending tax increases. But at the same time, the Water Pollution Control Authority on Beach Street has a problem and it’s about to hit the fan.
In the mayor’s 2026 budget, the sewer use rate is recommended to increase by a manageable 4.71 percent, from $488 per unit to $511 per unit (one unit generally equals one household). An addendum at the bottom of the “Sewer Use Fee Calculation” document further states, “Upgrades to the Sewer Plant were neglected for several years leaving investments to infrastructure at a critical juncture. It is imperative that we invest in the necessary upgrades for the purpose of our sewer, our clean water, our regulatory requirements and the health of our residents.” What this document fails to elucidate is the urgency of this need. When will this long-standing problem be addressed?
Prior to 2016, solid waste in West Haven was managed entirely by the staff of the city’s WPCA. Liquid was removed from the material and the city’s incinerator burned the resulting sludge. In April of that year, the incinerator broke down and the city’s waste was trucked out of state as a temporary measure, at the cost of $1,000 per 6,000-gallon truckload plus transportation expense. When a facility in Naugatuck had the capacity to accept the waste, it was trucked there. A repair initially estimated to take three weeks has been stalled for nine years. In this year’s budget, for the first time ever, the cost of trucking solid waste to Naugatuck is in a separate account, “Sewer Sludge Hauling – Removal.” Previously, the money the city paid to Synagro, the operator of the Naugatuck plant, and reported as “Electricity” expense, was buried in that account, leaving taxpayers in the dark regarding the real cost of disposing of their waste.
A West Haven Biosolids Study by CDM Smith, which was commissioned in 2022, became available in draft form in June 2023. A table contained within the document, entitled “Comparison of Sludge Handling Alternatives” makes it clear that the most cost-effective method for disposal is incineration, the method that the city has used previously. Even with an estimated construction cost of $20.4 million (or more, at this point in time), the city stands to save its taxpayers a tremendous amount of money over the long term. According to the study, the price to continue to haul the city’s waste to Naugatuck is estimated to quadruple in the future. Gasification, an alternative that has been mentioned by city staff, would potentially cost $56 million up-front, and would require the city to hire outside staff to manage the process. In addition, gasification has failed in Linden, New Jersey, when its ability to remove polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) did not meet the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requirements.
According to an Oct. 14, 2023, story in the New Haven Register, “City officials told the Municipal Accountability Review Board of planned multimillion dollar upgrades to the city’s wastewater treatment plant that they hope to address quickly to avoid ballooning costs in the future or potential environmental catastrophe, but time is ticking on the permits.”
The permit that the city obtained to upgrade the incinerator to meet the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards was set to expire by 2024 and, according to City Engineer Abdul Quadir, getting another permit would be “almost impossible.” At various times, Quadir has given the public the impression that the state is holding up the permitting process. In response to an inquiry as to the status of the permits, the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, Bureau of Air Management, Engineering Division, provided a long list of items that West Haven has to comply with or implement for permits the city needs to obtain.
Although this issue was identified as being time sensitive, two additional years have passed and we are no closer to having an operational incinerator than we were in 2023. In the FY 23-24 capital budget, the administration did not make any bonding requests for the incinerator upgrade. In FY 24-25, finally, there was a capital request for bonding for the incinerator rebuild: $3 million in FY 25-26 and $30 million in FY 26-27. Yet no progress was made.
On April 2, the Water Pollution Control Commission held a public hearing on its2025-2026 budget. In addition to the commissioners and city staff, six members of the public attended. What we learned was appalling. Despite the city’s best efforts to hire someone, there is no plant operator and no staff member on-site who regularly report to the commission. The plant administrator occasionally attends commission meetings, but the members of the commission are frustrated by the lack of communication and action. More urgently, the cost to truck waste to the facility in Naugatuck rises every year. According to the WPCC Chairman Bill Canning, “We can’t kick the can down the road any further.”
The mayor’s 2026 budget includes bonding requests for the incinerator project: $4.5 million in fiscal year 2026, then $16 million in each of the following two years. However, no one is actively seeking a permit for the project and no decision has been made about its scope. The $179,000 CDM Smith study addressing this situation was completed, but no action has been taken, according to Chairman Canning.
If bonding for the incinerator project is approved by the City Council and the Municipal Accountability Review Board, it will take approximately six months for an engineer to submit the permit application, then an additional 18 months for the city to obtain a permit. City Engineer Quadir estimates that it will take three years before the incinerator will be operational. In the years since the incinerator broke, the cost to repair it has increased from $3 million to over $30 million and that cost will continue to rise. The cost to truck the city’s waste to Naugatuck has risen from $667,000 in 2019 to $1.1 million in 2022 (CDM Smith study, 2023). That means the taxpayers have paid nearly $8 million during this “temporary” shutdown, and this cost will also rise.
While it is wonderful that the city has secured $10.4 million in funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to complete the “hardening” of the area around the treatment plant over the next two years, there is also an odor mitigation system that has been in need of repair since before 2022 and has been bonded for in both the 2022-2023 budget ($1.2 million) and the 2024-2025 budget ($1 million). This work has not been completed.
With no plant administrator and no emergent plan to repair the broken incinerator, chances are good that West Haven residents will have something a lot less pleasant than taxes to complain about in the next year or so.
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