Overview

The Louisville and Jefferson County Metropolitan Sewer District (MSD) owns and operates 39 wastewater treatment plants. MSD’s Pretreatment Program, the largest in Kentucky, covers a total of 122 Significant Industrial Users (41 of which are categorical) and 202 General Permittees, and has an annual budget of $1.3 million. The program has been very successful in fulfilling the requirements of the pretreatment regulations and MSD has adopted a continuous improvement philosophy. For example, the significant non-compliance rate currently stands at 4.8%, down from 44% in the early 1990’s.

Pretreatment is integrally linked at an operational level with other parts of the MSD system, including of course wastewater treatment, but also programs managing stormwater, combined sewer overflows (CSOs), sanitary sewer overflows (SSOs), biosolids, and overall watershed health. At a regulatory level, however, these programs are treated as if they existed each alone in separate, self-contained compartments. In the pretreatment program, this situation forces MSD to allocate scarce financial and human resources to administrative measures of success, rather than to environmental measures of success that can be observed in other parts of the MSD system and in receiving waters. More broadly, the disconnect between operations and regulations means that MSD is doing its best to optimize returns on its investments on a compartment by compartment basis, when it really needs to be optimizing investments across all MSD programs in order to achieve local environmental objectives.

For these reasons, MSD is proposing an XL Project that would decompartmentalize selected programs, starting with the pretreatment program, and integrate them by establishing informational, analytical, programmatic, and regulatory linkages between and among them with the single purpose of maximizing environmental, and in particular, watershed health. MSD believes there are significant opportunities to reallocate resources based on measures of environmental performance and target dollars, people, and requirements to those activities in the pretreatment program and in other programs in a way that provides a much higher environmental return on investments. This proposed XL program will enable MSD to capture these opportunities.

Project Approach

MSD has a good idea of the kinds of program changes that need to be made to get better environmental results, based on staff experience and involvement with AMSA’s and EPA’s pretreatment program reinvention efforts. But, more information is needed to specifically design and justify pretreatment program reinvention. For this reason, the pilot would proceed in three phases: data collection and analysis; program (re)development; and program implementation.

The proposed pilot would be conducted at one and possibly two of MSD’s regional treatment plants—Jeffersontown in the Chenoweth Run/Floyds Fork watershed and West County in the Pond Creek/Mill Creek watersheds—to test analytical approaches and effectiveness of new pretreatment program elements on a manageable scale. The intent is that the methodology would be transferable to MSD’s other regional treatment plants and to other municipalities.

Phase 1: Watershed Analysis, Source Identification, and Impact Analysis. In this project, MSD would more specifically identify environmental performance measures in terms of pollutant loadings. But first, a clearer understanding of the factors affecting watershed health is needed as a foundation for performance-based pretreatment programs and for the broader concept of watershed management. MSD would estimate loading contributions to the watershed . To accomplish this, MSD would expand its monitoring program to create relational links among POTW influent, effluent, and biosolids quality, collection system and stormwater runoff quality, and links to environmental impacts of each source on in-stream water quality. Then, MSD would study the effects of the pretreatment program, as well as other point and nonpoint source control measures. With information from these efforts, the relative impacts from existing loadings could then be identified. This would lay the foundation for MSD to move away from compartmentalized NPDES programs to a more holistic watershed protection strategy.

Phase 2: Alternatives Analysis and Program Redesign. Using information from Phase I, MSD would identify and evaluate more environmentally desirable loading patterns—including loadings to the collection system and treatment plants, stormwater facilities, and from plants and facilities to receiving waters. New pretreatment program elements could then be crafted and existing elements modified to get MSD from point A, existing loading patterns, to point B, new target loading patterns. New and modified program elements will have two primary objectives: (1) achieve additional reductions in key pollutant loadings; and, (2) identify areas of inefficient resource utilization to free-up resources that can be applied to achieve greater environmental benefits.

Phase 3: Implementation and Evaluation. As MSD implements a reinvented pretreatment program, the monitoring programs established at the outset of this project will be kept in place to enable continuous evaluation of the impacts of program modifications in the treatment system and in the watersheds. MSD believes it has the responsibility to demonstrate that a reinvented pretreatment program is working. Therefore, the new program would include extensive and meaningful reporting and assessment of watershed outcomes.

Environmental Benefits

MSD believes it can reduce loadings of key pollutants by as much as 10 to 20% if resources can be reallocated across programs and activities based on relative impact on watershed health, as described in the Overview section. These benefits will come about in two ways: (1) reduced influent loadings will lead to reduced effluent loadings; and (2) resources shifted from the pretreatment program to other programs will create additional improvements. The first phase of MSD’s proposed project would identify definitive watershed-based targets for reduction of pollutant loadings beyond levels projected in the absence of this project. If successful, MSD would ultimately replicate the program redesign and implementation process at other regional treatment plants and at the largest facility (105 mgd dry/250 mgd wet).

Regulatory Revision

MSD's approach is to gather data, set clear environmental goals based on that data, and then determine what regulatory and other changes are needed to get from point A to point B. While MSD has some idea of what those changes might be, as outlined below, we believe that options for regulatory flexibility should be considered with full information about their collective contribution to our ultimate objective, superior environmental performance.

Upon completion of Phases 1 and 2, MSD would propose regulatory revisions that would allow targeting of pretreatment activities toward those factors that have the greatest impact on watershed health. Specifically, MSD would pursue a redefinition of Significant Industrial User (SIU) to allow some relief of the current requirements for industrial users (SIUs and especially categorical industries) that have been determined to have little or no impact on the environment. With this redefinition, MSD would be able to determine appropriate permit parameters, monitoring frequencies, and inspection frequencies based on the potential for environmental impact. Additionally, MSD may want to pursue general permits for "like" dischargers and the inclusion of Best Management Practices on discharge permits. Where industrial users are potential threats to watershed health, MSD would inspect more frequently, require more precise permitting and more detailed monitoring, and take more aggressive enforcement action. Where indirect dischargers have little impact on the watershed, MSD would use the regulatory flexibility requested to achieve more efficient utilization of resources. MSD believes that the timing of any regulatory or resource allocation decisions should coincide with the timing of commitments to definitive watershed health objectives.

It should be noted, that in determining how best to interface with an industry, MSD believes that the historical compliance and performance record of the industry, as well as its impact on watershed health, are critical criteria. MSD would develop strict performance and compliance criteria to ensure that its partners in innovation are those firms and industries with solid environmental records.

Stakeholder Involvement

MSD would use existing and new mechanisms to bring stakeholders and citizens into the process of building a bridge between the pretreatment and watershed management programs. MSD already has met with representatives of the industrial and environmental communities to discuss this pretreatment reinvention proposal. MSD also has consulted with state officials who have been very supportive of the proposal. These activities would be continued and expanded, including establishment of a Watershed Task Force(s) that would represent all stakeholders and include citizen representatives appointed by local officials (MSD has used this model effectively to support pilot watershed projects). Regional and national stakeholders also would be welcome to join the effort.

Resource Modification

MSD envisions reallocating financial and human resources within the pretreatment program and across other program areas under this proposed project. A reinvented program would expand watershed monitoring activities and allow MSD to focus pretreatment resources—permitting, inspection, monitoring, enforcement and outreach—on environmental objectives in the watershed(s). Further, this proposal would provide MSD the flexibility to make resource investment decisions across all relevant programs, including pretreatment, stormwater, and wastewater—on the basis of environmental, as opposed to administrative, outcomes. For example, resources may be directed to efforts such as pollution prevention, CSO elimination prioritization, greenways, etc. MSD would use its performance-based budgeting system, which allows managers to understand where resources are going and to precisely direct staff time and effort, to help target resources most efficiently to advance watershed health.

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Pretreatment Index