Lower Heidelberg will pay $150,000 to Sinking Spring after long dispute over sewer fees

by Steve Reinbrecht

Update: Sinking Spring Borough Manager Mike Hart told me Feb. 21 that he had received the $150,000 from Lower Heidelberg.
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After a year-long dispute, Lower Heidelberg will pay Sinking Spring about $150,000 for treating its sewage, Lower Heidelberg Supervisor Deborah Scull said Thursday.

Much of the money was surcharges. The borough believes Lower Heidelberg and South Heidelberg are not properly enforcing rules about what businesses are allowed to drain into the system.

This is important because our quality of life and tax bills depend on properly managing sewage treatment.

Wastewater from the borough and parts of Spring, South Heidelberg and Lower Heidelberg drains to Sinking Spring’s treatment plant, at 2305 Reedy Road [not the plant at Reedy and State Hill, which is Spring’s plant.]

The four municipalities have an agreement about how to share the costs. Under that deal, at the end of 2015, Sinking Spring calculated that Lower Heidelberg owed it about $97,000 for that year's treatment.

Sinking Spring also reckoned that Lower Heidelberg owed about $50,000 in surcharges because it was sending wastewater that had too much “hot” or “strong” waste, such as oil and grease, that makes it harder and more expensive to treat.

The disputed payments equal more than 10 percent of the borough’s sewer-fund budget.

Lower Heidelberg held the payments as collateral in the dispute, Scull said last week. She released them after getting more information from Sinking Spring.

She said about $7,800 remains in dispute.

“Our engineer is talking to their engineer.”

Monday, Sinking Spring borough manager Mike Hart said he had not received the money but had sent another bill last week.

Over the year, Lower Heidelberg failed to respond to a series of invoices, he said.

Lower Heidelberg thinks Sinking Spring might be charging it for hot waste generated in South Heidelberg.

Hart said both townships have problems. The borough tests the wastewater from Lower Heidelberg and South Heidelberg at manholes at the point it enters the borough’s system. It consistently exceeds the limits in the agreement, he said.

Lab tests prove that waste from Spring and the borough is not hot, Hart said.

Hart believes the townships might not be enforcing rules that require sewer customers to pre-treat their waste before it gets into the system.

Scull doubts the grease is coming from businesses in Lower Heidelberg, such as Sheetz or the Bar-B-Q Pit.

Instead, she said, it could be coming from food places on the South Heidelberg side of Penn Avenue, which include Subway, the Steak Shack, Arby’s, Salute Ristorante Italiano, Wendy’s, China Moon and Redner’s.

In June, Lower Heidelberg’s engineer, Pamela Stevens, of Systems Design Engineering, said she believes the strong waste is being produced by South Heidelberg businesses.

The dispute goes back at least to March, when minutes record that Lower Heidelberg received a bill from South Heidelberg for an industrial surcharge.

South Heidelberg Township Manager Sean McKee had no comment.

The borough’s treatment plant can treat 1.25 million gallons a day, and has capacity reserved for Sinking Spring’s downtown revitalization plans. The 2017 sewer-fund budget is $1.31 million. Sinking Spring council members disbanded a municipal authority in August 2008 to cut costs. The authority had been formed in 1961.