Improvements would cost
$7.2 million
By GINGER SHIRAS
Carroll County Bureau

GREEN FOREST — The city council got its first look Thursday at the cost of meeting the state’s strict new requirement to take the phosphorus out of the treated wastewater it sends to Table Rock Lake in Missouri.
The answer is $7.2 million to build and $900,000 a year to operate.
That is the cost to upgrade the existing sewer plant to meet the state’s first-time limits on phosphorus flowing out of state and increase the plant’s treatment capacity from 2.4 million gallons a day to 3.25 million gallons a day.
The design would provide a 40 percent increase in capacity and cost 20 percent more than phosphorus removal alone, the engineers said.
They noted that with its existing capacity, the city could not now treat all 1.9 million gallons a day that Tyson Foods is legally entitled to send the sewer plant as part of an agreement when the company helped the finance the city’s new sewer plant in the mid-1980s. Tyson’s chicken plant now provides 1.43 million gallons of sewage a day, which is 80 percent of the city’s total sewage.
Two cheaper solutions from the engineers provided no capacity for growth.
Mayor Richard Deweese said sewer improvements should be good for the 20 years it costs to pay for them and the coming upgrade won’t do that unless the capacity is also enough for 20 years.
The three solutions now go to Tyson, which will have to help pay for the improvements. The engineers from McGoodwin Williams and Yates of Fayetteville promised to come back and show the city how it might pay for its share.
The city might qualify for perhaps a million dollars in economic development grants from the state if the city can show that Tyson would add jobs with the improvements or lose jobs without them, engineer Jim Ulmer said.
But the city would still be left to finance a hefty loan, which could be repaid from a sales tax, sewer bill increases, property tax increases or some combination of the three.
The state has told Green Forest to limit its phosphorus outflow to one milligram per liter by December of next year, but the engineers said the deadline could be extended if the city shows the state it is making progress.
Also Thursday, the council voted to ask the Carroll County Quorum Court to collect the city’s current 2.8 mill property tax again next year. Thursday’s special meeting was called to formalize the tax for today’s quorum court meeting.