Editor,
I, Jody Flanagan (Mayor of Thomas), would like to clear up a few statements with the article written on January 3, 2024, in The Parsons Advocate about the Blackwater PSD and the comments of the executive director Judy Rodd with Friends of Blackwater and AI Tomson.
One of Judy Rodd’s concerns is with Thomas’s sewer plant and leachate. Rodd told the Parsons Advocate, “She was reminded of her concerns over the leachate trucked to Thomas for treatment and the facility’s yearly fines.” The City of Thomas has worked diligently with the DEP and Tucker Co Solid Waste Authority over the past two years to ensure the proper procedures have been followed according to our sewer and leachate permit. This can be found on the DEP’s website.
The leachate was not added all at once to the sewage; it went into a pretreatment tank and was added at the amount allotted (4K gallons per day under our trial permit). The article also quotes Mayor AI Tomson and Blackwater PSD president, “that engineers are also talking to the landfill and talking to Thomas about creating a pretreatment process at the landfill or the cities treatment plant which would allow leachate to periodically be added to the wastewater.” This process already exists and has existed for the past ten years.
Also, according to Rodd, “a retired DEP sewage worker informed her that many of the problems Thomas is experiencing would be alleviated through enclosing the existing tanks in order to maintain temperature.” “A guy from the DEP who used to manage sewer systems, said they could solve a whole lot of problems if they just enclosed the tanks”. Rodd said, “Because it’s too cold. If they enclosed them with a little bit of heat, the bacteria would do a lot better, and the system would work”. In response to this quotation, under the trial period for leachate, the City of Thomas and its engineers put implements in place and, therefore, never
received any violations.
Since the City of Thomas was taking the leachate and doing the maintenance and running the leachate on a trial basis, the City of Thomas has NOT received a fine in the last three years. All City of Thomas employees work diligently to ensure all proper procedures are followed. To address Mayor AI Tomson’s quote, “The
Thomas sewer facility was over-capacitated.” The City of Thomas’s actual sewer facility was built to treat 300,000 gallons; however, Thomas is permitted to treat at most 150,000 gallons daily. The city actually treats 40,000-50,000 gallons of sewage per day; therefore, Thomas is within its permitted capacity.
Due to the information printed in the paper, I, Jody Flanagan (Mayor of Thomas), felt the need to get the correct information printed. In the future, the City of Thomas would appreciate any concerns about public utilities being brought to our attention before false statements are published as they were in this article. A public meeting could allow these concerns to be addressed correctly. I strongly encourage all residents of the City of Thomas to attend these public meetings and not let outside special interest groups dictate the outcomes of these meetings.