The Newtown Bucks County Joint Municipal Authority has issued a statement after the plan for a 2.5 million gallon per day wastewater treatment plant in Newtown Township faced strong opposition.
The proposed wastewater plant would be located on a 17.5-acre site off Lower Silver Lake Road and University Drive near the Newtown Bypass, just a few hundred feet away from the border with Middletown Township.
Last week, residents of Newtown Township and neighboring Middletown and Lower Makefield townships voiced concerns to the Newtown Township Board of Supervisors about potential odors, environmental impacts, and questionable financial benefits of the project proposed by authority that handles wastewater for Newtown borough and township.
The authority issued the below statement on the plan this week:
The Newtown Bucks County Joint Municipal Authority is aware of the opposition to this plant in the surrounding communities. We are listening and will take your serious concerns into consideration before making any decision. Our due diligence demands that we move slowly and listen to the experts and the community to fully understand the competing issues and to make the right choices. As a general rule, the public will have the opportunity to review land development plans considered by the local governing body prior to any final decision being rendered. We welcome public participation in this project. We will continue to investigate the technology. We understand that although we may be evaluating the best available today, it still may not be good enough. After all, any such plant is very expensive to build and maintain and must last for 50 years or more if it is to be a sound investment.
We take due diligence seriously. Our customers and communities demand no less.
As a public authority under the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, we are committed to providing the resident and business ratepayers of Newtown Borough and Township with the most cost-effective and safest solutions for wastewater treatment services, mindful of the increasing needs of our community as well as the more demanding legal framework in which we operate. Based on the information we know from Bucks County Water and Sewer Authority, with which we are a customer and with Philadelphia Water Department (the treatment facility currently used for all waste generated by BCWSA’s Bucks County Regional System, including this Authority), significant rate hikes are likely forthcoming from both entities that would adversely impact the Authority and its ratepayers.
We decided that it was important to understand all our options going forward to protect our customers from the long-term impact of rate inflation beyond our control. We asked our engineers to look into the feasibility of constructing our own local wastewater treatment facilities to determine if that would enable us to better control costs, better maintain the system, and provide state-of-the-art technology for the future, when more stringent standards would be mandated to protect the environment.
Toward that end, we retained expert assistance from wastewater management experts, financial consultants, and have undertaken initial studies in these areas to determine whether it would be the right decision to move forward on such a plan. By this we mean, would it be both economically and environmentally sound to decide to build such a plant?
We do not have all those studies/reports complete and it will be months before we do, likely toward the end of 2025. We will make those documents public once we have analyzed them.
For further information on the Authority, and this project, please visit www.nbcjma.org.
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