Fort Worth’s proposed wastewater plant prompts worries about effect on Trinity River
At a virtual public meeting on Monday, concerns over the environmental impact of Fort Worth’s first new wastewater treatment plant since the 1950s will come to a head as both Tarrant Regional Water District officials and Trinity River enthusiasts seek to protest the city’s proposals.
For much of the past 20 years, Fort Worth has planned to build the Mary’s Creek Water Reclamation Facility to accommodate growth in businesses and homes in the western part of the city. The city operates only one wastewater treatment plant: the Village Creek Water Reclamation Facility in east Fort Worth, which serves most of Tarrant County and parts of Johnson County.
“The kind of plant that we’re talking about building, it’s state-of-the-art, world class,” said Chris Harder, Fort Worth’s water director. “We are not cutting costs when it comes to the actual plant design and construction, and the expectations on the water quality from this are as high as they can possibly be.”
While Fort Worth has owned the 100-acre plot next to the creek since 2011, the city began to seriously pursue a wastewater discharge permit from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality in 2016, Harder said. The commission issued a draft permit in March, indicating its initial approval of Fort Worth’s plans to discharge treated wastewater into Mary’s Creek without negatively affecting water quality of the creek or the Clear Fork of the Trinity River.
Since then, the permit has faced hurdles in the form of opposition from the Tarrant Regional Water District, which is the primary supplier of raw water to 11 North Texas counties and oversees water quality in parts of the Trinity and four major reservoirs.
Water district officials filed a formal protest with the TCEQ in April, citing computer modeling data that predicted potential harm to the Trinity’s water quality downstream and an increased risk of a blue-green algae bloom, particularly in summer months when Mary’s Creek runs dry.
That protest, along with public comments from people who use the creek for fishing and boating, led the TCEQ to hold a public meeting at 7 p.m. Monday. The dispute may end with a contested case hearing, which is similar to a civil trial in state district court.
The Tarrant Regional Water District wants Fort Worth to either use the facility’s water for irrigation, therefore eliminating the need to discharge it into Mary’s Creek, or to let the Tarrant Regional Water District pay for pipelines to transfer the majority of the wastewater effluent to another lake so it can be more diluted and provide water supply for the region, said Woody Frossard, the district’s environmental director.
“We do support the city in their need to develop additional wastewater treatment to handle the growth of the city,” said Dan Buhman, the deputy general manager of the water district. “We just support an option that does that with no negative impacts to water quality, and with positive impacts to water supply costs. We think there’s a viable solution that does that.”
While the city’s analysis meets TCEQ standards, the permit application does not encompass how the wastewater discharges could affect the Trinity downstream, according to Frossard. During the summer, discharges from the treatment plant could make up 99% of the Trinity’s flow through Clear Fork, Frossard said.
Without other sources of water to dilute the wastewater, Frossard worries that blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, would bloom during the busiest recreational months of the year and negatively affect the ecosystem. Several dogs who swam in an Austin lake last year died as a result of an algae bloom, he noted.
“We’re very concerned that it will create a condition that will cause a public health issue,” Frossard said. “Once we start seeing that issue, we would have to shut the river down for public contact.”
City officials say that the wastewater will improve the health of the creek by making it less stagnant and therefore less prone to algae blooms. The plant will remove enough nitrogen and phosphorus during the treatment process to where blooms will not be an “issue at all,” Harder said.
“We would never have sited this location where we did without a discharge in Mary’s Creek,” Harder said. “You don’t ever see plants designed in one location, and then the effluent discharged miles and miles away. You could see that kind of situation with secondary discharges or alternate discharges, but you still want to have the primary discharge on the creek that the plant is located on.”
This is not the first conflict between Fort Worth officials and water district leaders, who during a City Council meeting in August debated the district’s efforts to grow its influence over real estate development connected to its water sources.
Frossard said it is not unusual for the Tarrant Regional Water District to weigh in on projects that affect the Trinity or reservoirs it oversees. But Harder said he was surprised when the water district filed its formal protest, and does not think the alternative proposals are feasible because of the high operational costs of transporting the wastewater and the years it takes to get permits from the TCEQ.
The disconnect between the water district and city leadership over the environmental impact of the Mary’s Creek plant is concerning to Teresa Patterson, who serves as the paddle trail manager for the Trinity Coalition, a nonprofit organization focused on improving the river. The coalition has encouraged fly fishermen and others who use the Trinity to comment on Fort Worth’s proposal through the TCEQ website.
“As a private person, as a member of an environmental-oriented nonprofit, and as a person who’s on the river all the time, this is incredibly alarming to me to find out that the city won’t talk to the current regional water district, who is one of the caretakers of our waterways,” Patterson said. “That’s, frankly, terrifying.”
Buhman said he would like to find a way for the two parties to negotiate openly, but the looming possibility of the contested case hearing is “hampering” their ability to do so.
If the TCEQ approves the city’s permit request, the design and construction process would still take between five and six years before the Mary’s Creek plant is fully operational, Harder said. In the meantime, Frossard and Buhman hope that the city will look beyond the requirements of the permit and think about how discharging the wastewater into the creek could affect the ecosystem downstream.
“The river is a focal point of the residents here of Fort Worth and the region,” Buhman said. “I know the city is interested in protecting it just as much as we are, and so I think they should want to look all the way downstream, just like we do.”
This story was originally published October 2, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
