Inside Elizabethtown’s 60-year journey to a public sewer system

Has the time finally come for this small Adirondack community to build wastewater infrastructure?

By Tim Rowland

For once, failing septic systems were a good thing. Dyes injected into private systems began showing up in the Boquet River, adding urgency to a project that has festered for nearly 60 years — building a public sewer for Elizabethtown.

“It was unfortunate, but it was also fortunate. We got the scientific data to show that this was an issue of water quality,” said Elizabethtown Supervisor Cathleen Reusser. 

The Boquet and two tributaries converge in Elizabethtown — “You have to cross a bridge to get here,” Reusser says — waters that the town wants to protect. But past plans have been done in by neighbors who weren’t particularly interested in having a wastewater treatment plant alongside their particular stream bank.

This time, engineers tucked the proposed plant in a more secluded spot behind the municipal golf course, a location for the treatment plant that was not objectionable to residents of the hamlet of 1,100 people.

Tapping available funding sources

Funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill will pay for half of the project’s cost, which is expected to exceed $30 million. “With billions of federal and state dollars available right now to develop durable infrastructure and communities, now is the time for Elizabethtown to finally build a municipal wastewater system that it has needed and been planning for decades,” the town stated on a public-information web page explaining the project.

Adirondack sewer projects are a delicate dance of grants, low-interest loans and user fees where the line between what’s affordable and what’s not can make or break a project. 

A long time coming

Public sewer for one of the Adirondacks’ more important towns first became an item for discussion in 1966, Reusser said. Everything from costs to community objections ultimately sank every proposal. 

Development has moved forward through the years, said the county’s Industrial Development Authority co-director Jody Olcott, but public sewer is a missing piece in a hamlet that had about every other advantage. “We’re the county seat, we’re in the heart of the Adirondacks and we have so much to offer,” Reusser said. Elizabethtown is one of the few Adirondack communities that can boast a hospital, car dealerships, a grocery and drug stores, a nursing home, a major museum, newspaper offices and a county government complex employing more than 500 people.

Reusser said, however, that businesses that use a lot of water, such as bakeries, car washes and laundromats are non-starters. And while some new housing can be built on septic systems, public sewer helps create the scale and density that typically makes housing more affordable, said Megan Murphy, executive director of Adirondack Roots, a nonprofit housing facilitator. 

“Predevelopment costs (such as roads, site work and utilities) are one of the biggest costs to any development,” Murphy said. “Hooking into a public wastewater system is a much less expensive way to go.”  

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Where to site the project?

The hamlet does have developable space, perhaps most visibly a large lot left vacant when the former hospital  and office complex Hubbard Hall burned in 2011. Despite being a prime location on Main Street, the lot remains empty.

Along with private homes, large institutions and businesses are all on private septic systems, many of which are living on borrowed time. They present another problem too: As new public sewer lines are dug, backhoes have to dodge the old septic systems. “We have all these weird little constraints in town, which is why we need the project in the first place,” Reusser said.

Partially at issue is the new location of the plant, which is across town from the Boquet, where the treated water would ideally be discharged. That means the effluent will have to be piped across town to treat, then, once treated, back across town to release. 

Voters had the final say, rejecting a plan with a creekside plant in 2010. The new location has broad support, Reusser said, even though engineers warned it will require more pipe and likely lead to higher costs..

The golf course location is near a small stream where treated water could be released, but Greg Swart, director of the Water Resources Division of the engineering firm AES Northeast, said small streams are less likely to win approval of the Department of Environmental Conservation. Swart said the amount of treated water in the hamlet will be small — equal to a couple of swimming pools — but “going to the Boquet is the safer option.”

One way or the other, Reusser said the project needs to be done. “I’m optimistic this will all work out,” she said.