Petersburg will receive $8 million in federal funding to complete plans for mandatory upgrades at the town’s wastewater treatment facility.
Alaska’s U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski secured the funds for Petersburg in an appropriations bill that President Trump signed on Jan. 23.
The Petersburg Borough must upgrade its wastewater disinfection system and how it treats the water it discharges into Frederick Sound to meet tighter water quality standards. Borough officials anticipate it will be an expensive project.
“The $8 million is huge,” Borough Manager Steve Giesbrecht said in an interview. “We’re going to take it. It’s a big win.”
The federal Clean Water Act requires municipalities to perform two levels of treatment to wastewater before discharging it.
But for decades, Petersburg and several other communities in Alaska have been allowed to discharge treated wastewater into the ocean without full secondary treatment under a waiver permit issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
To meet Alaska’s updated water quality standards, the agency issued a stricter wastewater discharge permit that went into effect last year in Petersburg. The Borough has five years to comply.
“It’s a pain because it costs so much, and we really would have rather done it on our own timetable,” Giesbrecht said. “But at the end of the day, we’ll end up with cleaner wastewater going out into the ocean. That’s not a bad thing. It’s expensive, but it’s not a bad thing.”
Giesbrecht said the Borough has been taking steps to meet the agency’s improvement targets in the meantime, including hiring staff for additional lab testing. At a Petersburg Borough Assembly meeting on Feb. 2, he said wastewater staff recently implemented a new tablet chlorination system at the town’s plant to help meet the stricter discharge permit standards, “until a more effective disinfection system is developed.”
The overall project could cost roughly $12 to $15 million, but that’s just an initial estimate. Giesbrecht said the $8 million that Sen. Murkowski secured for Petersburg will be used to complete engineering and disinfectant studies, which will determine the project’s details, including an official cost estimate.
It could take several months for the funds to get distributed to the Borough, now that the bill has been signed into law.
