The Altoona Water Authority is trying to negotiate down a pair of $27,000 fines for failure to turn in sewer plant inflow data on time to the Environmental Protection Agency, according to General Manager Mark Perry.
The EPA imposed the fines - one for each of the authority's two plants - because the authority didn't submit a plan to sample inflow from industrial users or its evaluation of the subsequent findings on time.
Other pressing work - the design of the renovation of the authority's Westerly sewer plant and the revision of wastewater regulations - distracted Environmental Services Manager George Boliski.
"I literally forgot about it," Boliski said. "Too much work, and it just got put on the back burner."
The tardiness has led to no violation of effluent limits, nor any additional risk for such violations, because the authority did an analysis in 2005 after Penn Jacobson and SKF closed. Since then, industrial discharges haven't substantially changed, Boliski said.
EPA Region 3 spokesman David Sternberg confirmed that there have been talks with the authority about reducing the fines, that the agency sometimes agrees to settlements that are less than initially proposed penalties and that there has been no evidence of environmental harm in this case.
"This is an issue of the integrity of the program," he said.
The deadline for a sampling plan was April 29, 2008, and the deadline for the analysis based on the sampling was Jan. 29, 2009. EPA had issued the permit a year earlier.
The authority didn't find out until a little more than a month ago that it had overlooked the requirements, according to Boliski.
It began sampling as soon as it found out, he said. It will last until December, and the evaluation will last until January, he said.
The authority keeps track of substances discharged from plants - such as chromium and zinc from a manufacturer of petroleum product gauges - to ensure they stay below prescribed limits, according to Boliski.
The required analysis helps to determine whether those "pretreatment limits" need to be adjusted, Sternberg said.
If industrial plants violate those limits, they must be notified and may be liable to fines, Boliski said.
The EPA's every-five-year renewal of the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination Systems permits for the plants triggered the requirements.
The EPA allows 90 days after a permit renewal for authorities to submit a sampling plan and a year for them to submit a re-evaluation.
Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 949-7038.
