KALONA

When the City of Kalona was issued its most recent discharge permit for the wastewater treatment facility a couple years ago by the DNR, it came with new limits for effluent wastewater – more stringent limits than the existing facility is capable of meeting. The city must have a plan in place for how they are going to meet these limits by July 2024, and the facility must be operational and in compliance by Spring 2027.

The city engineer, Jack Pope, met with the city council on Tuesday, March 12 for a work session in which he outlined how the city might address updating the wastewater treatment facility.

The new limits are the result of a 20-year process initially driven by the EPA, the goal of which is to reduce nitrogen in streams that run into the Mississippi River, and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico, Pope explained.

“When the DNR started changing their permit limits, they did a stream study analysis of every stream in the state, and these limits came down,” he said.

First continually discharging facilities had to be updated and improved, and now controlled discharge facilities, like Kalona’s, must meet the same requirements.

“There’s no favoritism; everybody’s subject to the same thing,” he said.

Pope outlined a wastewater treatment system for the council that would reconfigure the city’s three-cell lagoon system, which discharges twice a year, into a new aerated system with UV disinfection that would discharge roughly monthly. The new system would meet the DNR’s limits for ammoniacal nitrogen and E. coli that the existing lagoons cannot.

The price tag: around $4 to $5 million, Pope estimates.

City Administrator Ryan Schlabaugh began the meeting by saying that the city’s goal “has always been that we like to keep our rates as low as we possibly can and provide the best service without borrowing and having to raise rates.”

Although both of those options may need to be utilized, Schlabaugh hopes to find grant funding for the facility upgrade if possible.

“The state does issue grants,” he said, for similar types of projects, “So we want to be prepared when those opportunities arise and not just wait until 2027 and then have sticker-shock and an unknown of what we’re going to do.”

The city is still in the early in the planning process, and no final decisions about how to proceed with the wastewater treatment facility have been made.

Water Treatment Plants

The city’s two water treatment plants were also on the agenda for the night’s work session. The North and South plants were built in 1997, almost 30 years ago when the city had some 600 fewer residents.

“To think it’s not time for expansion would be kind of a ‘bury your head in the sand’ type of thing,” Pope said.

The options, put simply, are to expand the North plant, abandon the South plant, connect the South plant to rural water, or a combination thereof.

“I think we are at that position where we do need to explore the next stage of what our plants need to be,” Schlabaugh said. “Staff has done a wonderful job throughout a lot of years to maintain and to keep them where they’re at. But we’re starting to see consistent cracks in it in the sense that we’re seeing more issues. And we want to be proactive in that.”

Pope will explore all the city’s options and present them to the council at a later date.

Future Development

The city is looking forward to the development of 54.12 acres of city-owned property south of Highway 22, the Yoder property. The expectation is to put out a Request for Qualifications/Request for Proposals (RFQ/RFP) to developers next month.

The city would like to see primarily residential units, a mix of single-family and multi-family, and possibly some commercial development. The city also has some requirements to be met, including that 5 acres be set aside for parks and green space, and that the community be pedestrian-friendly.

The choice of developer will not simply be a matter of money, Schlabaugh noted, but of whose vision fits the city best.

The council will continue to discuss this development at future meetings.