A plan for the unfunded federal mandates to reduce combined sewer system overflows — and most likely will result in higher sewer and water rates to pay for it — is due in a little more than three months.

Tuesday, the city had submitted about 300 pages of research to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that will support the plan that outlines spending between $150 million and $200 million. About half of Middletown is serviced by the combined sewer system, including the city’s downtown.

The plan is more than a decade in the making, when the U.S. EPA first announced its goal to reduce the overflows of the combined sewer systems, which contains storm water and sewer water. More than 770 communities in the country have or are negotiating with the U.S. EPA to address the overflows for combined sewer systems. The federal agency first started with larger cities, like Chicago, Cleveland and Cincinnati, which will spend billions of dollars over a few decades.

Now the EPA is working to bring medium-sized cities on board. The city’s initial plan in 2000 called for spending around $120 million. This past November, Preston Combs, interim Public Works and Utilities director, said sewer and water rates could triple or quadruple over the next decade to pay for the unfunded mandate that’s now projected to cost at least $150 million.

The ultimate goal of this plan is to reduce the number of overflows in the combined sewer lines — which the city has more than 1.2 million linear feet — to the river, he said. The pipes lead to the city’s wastewater treatment plant, but there are several overflow points that result in combined storm and sewage water that enters the Great Miami River, either directly or through one of its tributaries, like Dick’s Creek.

The U.S. EPA wants those overflow events reduced from the current 60 to 80 times a year to under a dozen, Combs said. City officials have said the discharge is very diluted and tests taken at Germantown Road and the Ohio 73 bridge show contamination is minimal.

Combs said there are a number of different ways to reduce the overflows: building storage tanks for the overflows that will slowly be released to the wastewater treatment plant; treating the combined storm and waste water in the pipe to reduce the solids and potential contaminants; and build a huge pipe to carry all the overflow to the plant.

A newer option could be a “green initiative,” that would divert storm water into a retention pond, said Combs. That would prevent storm water from entering the pipe, which is why overflows happen, he said.

“When you’ve got these heavy rains, you’ve got (a lot) flow in your pipe and so it’s four, five, 10 times as much material flowing in that sewer,” Combs said. “If you can hold back some of that stormwater, that clean water like in the park.”

The ultimate price tag, if it’s closer to $150 million or closer to $200 million, will be dependent on the U.S. EPA, Combs said.

“The longer amount of time the EPA gives us to come up with a solution, the more money we would eventually spend,” he said. “If we have a shorter period of time, say 20 years, it would be at the lower end of the scale.”

But as potential new regulations and protocols are implemented in the years and decades to come, the plan can change, he said.

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