City, state reach accord on sewer

Kalispell and the state recently reached a tentative verbal agreement to allow the city to continue its long-standing ways of dealing with sewage concerns in preliminary plats.

City and Montana Department of Environmental Quality officials met Friday in Helena to discuss the issue, which had the potential to stall several projects in northern Kalispell.

Both sides agreed that Kalispell adequately addresses the sewage needs in its approved preliminary plats.

And both sides agreed that the city should request in writing a deviation from state regulations to continue its current practices - with a verbal agreement that the state likely will approve that request, Kalispell Public Works Director Jim Hansz said.

The city's current practice is to begin designing solutions to sewer bottlenecks when they actually reach 80 percent of their capacity, regardless of what the preliminary plats map out on paper.

Then the city begins installing improved sewer lines and upgrading lift stations when the bottleneck is actually at 95 percent capacity.

The state looked over Kalispell's procedures and agreed they are solid, Hansz said.

Friday's meeting was prompted by a Feb. 4 letter from the Department of Environmental Quality that said the agency was extremely reluctant to approve any new preliminary plats for northern Kalispell.

That's because all of the approved preliminary plats in northern Kalispell would build enough homes to reach the city's 2009 capacity to transport the sewage south to the sewage treatment plant.

This goes against Kalispell's unofficial pattern of letting whichever developer moves the fastest to get dibs on the available sewage transport capacity.

Right now, all of northern Kalispell's sewage goes through the Grandview Drive lift station, making it a bottleneck.

The city wants to build a second main north-south sewer line in western Kalispell, but that project still is in the initial brainstorming stage. It could be years before that line is built.

This spring, the city plans to upgrade the Grandview lift station so it can handle 860 gallons of sewage a minute - giving it an unused capacity of an extra 444 gallons a minute. Those unused gallons translate to the ability to serve 1,168 new homes.

Preliminary plats already approved for northern Kalispell do not quite reach that amount.

Preliminary plats are essentially rough initial plans on how a development will be laid out, after the city council approves them.

A preliminary plat also needs the approval of the Department of Environmental Quality, which looks at a developer's likely sewage volumes and the city's capacity to deal with them.

The approved preliminary plats for northern Kalispell translate to 993 typical houses - meaning the Grandview lift station has about 175 homes' worth of unallocated capacity.

In February, the City Council was scheduled to vote on the preliminary plat for the second and final phase of northernmost Kalispell's Silverbrook Estates subdivision.

The second phase's preliminary plat calls for 197 single-family homes, 90 townhouse lots, 13 commercial lots and one fire station lot on the final 167 acres of the 325-acre project.

That is significantly more than the Grandview lift station's unallocated capacity to handle 175 extra homes.

And Glacier Town Center - with sewage needs that have not been made public yet - plus two other north-side residential projects still are expected to apply for preliminary plats.

Here are two more wrinkles:

n A developer, depending on finances and the market, might take anywhere from several months to 20 years to completely build a project approved in a preliminary plat.

Or a project might be canceled - sometimes not even making it to the final plat stage.

n Kalispell's unofficial pattern has been to approve preliminary plats as long as they meet the city's conditions.

The fastest projects to get to the final plat stage - meaning they are ready to build - are the first in line to get the Grandview station's unused capacity. The slower developers will have to wait until a new sewer line gets built.

Consequently, a stalled project with a preliminary plat could fall behind a younger faster-moving project in hooking up to the city's sewers.

The council delayed action on the Silverbrook Estates preliminary plat until at least March 16, hoping to hash out the issue with the state by then.

Reporter John Stang may be reached at 758-4429 or by e-mail at jstang@dailyinterlake.com