CWC Channels Millions to Mountaintop for Treatment Upgrades

By Michael Ryan

WINDHAM - If the subject of sewage doesn’t strike you as riveting winter reading, perhaps a couple of million bucks getting invested in Windham will, channelled through the Catskill Watershed Corporation.

Town officials were given cause to celebrate by a CWC announcement, last month, that as much as $5 million will be flowing into the mountaintop to construct septage acceptance facilities here and in nearby Prattsville.

The money has its source in the Department of Environmental Protection as part of the New York City agency’s mandate to preserve the water quality of its upstate reservoir network.

CWC, unveiling the financial windfall, stated their, “board of directors has formally approved the Fourth Supplemental Side Agreement to the 1997 New York City Watershed Memorandum of Agreement (MOA).”

The agreement marks, “a significant milestone in the ongoing partnership to protect water quality while supporting the economic vitality of West-of-Hudson communities,” the CWC stated.

Windham town supervisor Thomas Hoyt, hearing of the grant dollars in early December, considered it an early infrastructure Christmas.

“This is something a lot of people probably don’t give much thought to but it is important to our area and the town of Windham,” Hoyt said.

Plans to modify what kind of sewage can be accepted at the local treatment plant have been a hot topic for several years.

Hoyt, in layman’s terms, previously explained the rationale behind the project when efforts began to secure DEP dollars for the task.

“Two years ago, [the Department of Environmental Protection] started to cut back on how much septic from private haulers they’d take at their treatment plants,” Hoyt said, including the Windham site.

“It was a shock for everybody. It started a ruckus because it was going to produce real problems for the haulers, needing to truck it further away, meaning it was more expensive and complicated.

“Some area towns got together with DEP and the [Catskill Watershed Corporation] to figure out if there was a way to correct the problem.

“DEP decided to write letters to municipalities with active plants to see if they would accept the septic materials,” Hoyt said.

“We said yes. We were encouraged to submit documentation on how to proceed. CWC accepted a proposal from us to investigate,” an effort financed by the CWC to the tune of a $50,000 grant.

It was discovered that in order to safely welcome any foreign septic matter, especially stuff that has been sitting around a while, a kind of Mini-Me treatment network needed to be created, at considerable expense.

That network would chemically acclimate any higher-intensity poop, brought from beyond the local district, to readily absorbable goop.

“The idea is to make the bad bugs work with the good bugs, getting all the google gobbles figured out,” Hoyt said in his down-home style.

“An underground receiving station could be constructed with discharge into underground tanks with proper aeration and odor control.

“Once that septic matter is treated and becomes sludge, it can be added to what we normally do here, at the right pace and time,” Hoyt said.

Having factored in all the google gobbles, Delaware Engineering presented their findings in the 50-page Septic Receiving Station Feasibility Study.

Experts at the DEP, CWC and Delaware Engineering, who do think a lot about what goes in one end and out the other, entered into a lengthy, ultimately productive collaboration, resulting in the $5 million.

It is expected a similarly long permitting process will now begin to unfold, involving DEP and State Department of Environmental Conservation.

Groundbreaking will likely occur in the late summer or early fall of 2026, leading to flipping startup switches in the first quarter of 2027.

In the meantime, for anyone so inclined, a real page-turner of a report has been written by Delaware Engineering stating, “the septage receiving station will consist of a piped inlet for connection to the septage truck.

Further, the station will have, “a metering system which automatically records the volume discharged from each truck, a rock trap and a fine screen housed in a stainless-steel tank.

“The fine screen will be equipped with an auger arrangement which washes and then discharges the screenings to a waste disposal container for off-site disposal,” the report states, etc. etc.