The MWMC is now accepting public comments on the proposed Industrial Pretreatment Program Legal Authority Modifications. Industrial pretreatment is part of the MWMC’s and local governments’ responsibility to ensure wastewater received at the regional treatment plant can be properly cleaned before being released into the Willamette River. The proposed changes are a part of the MWMC’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System Permit renewal and will bring local pretreatment and source control limits into compliance with applicable state and federal regulations.

The MWMC will be accepting public comments until 5:00 PM PST, March 31^st. You can learn more about the proposed changes and how to submit your comment on our website.

If you haven’t checked out the MWMC’s Annual Report yet, you definitely should! It provides a look back at the MWMC’s major accomplishments in 2022 and updates on upcoming projects. One of our milestones in 2022 was receiving a renewed NPDES Permit from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. This permit sets the minimum water quality standards for our regional wastewater treatment plant under the Clean Water Act.

As a result of careful planning from Eugene and Springfield staff, the new permit contains relatively little new regulation for our water treatment requirements, which is a great thing! Staff have continually improved and refined our practices since our last permit was issued 20 years ago, keeping up with evolving regulations, and ensuring the MWMC was in an excellent position to receive a new permit with no disruption to operations and minimal impact to our customers.

About 30 years. Started on June 9^th of ’93. I started here as a tech. I went through the apprenticeship program, and within about 3 years I was promoted to lead worker, and I was a lead for about 14 years before I took over as supervisor. So I’ve been at this site (BMF) since ’93.

I was a temp at the wastewater plant in 1988 and went to school for water and wastewater technology and got my 2-year degree in water and wastewater technology, and at that time the operations supervisor, Bob Sprick, told me if I wanted to come back and work for the City of Eugene, I needed at least 2 years of experience and a wastewater level 2 certification. So that was my goal, to go somewhere and get that experience, so I worked for Lincoln City for a year in their wastewater plant, and then I got a job with the City of Sweet Home and worked a year and a half in their water and wastewater plant, doing both. By that time I got my level 2 certification, and I had my 2 years of experience. Then a job came open out here, and I applied for it and got it.

When I started it was just the operations building, the lagoons, and the drying beds. That was it. There was no dewatering building, the tanks weren’t there, there was no biocycle farm, none of that was here. So through the years, my old supervisor and our team that worked together, we had ideas on where the program should go and what was needed to make the program successful. One of the things we wanted to do was get some part of the property where we had control over the harvesting time and being able to put the solids on when we needed to. Early on we ran into a lot of problems where we’d pump liquid solids into drying beds, and it’s hard to dry them in the amount of time that we had during the summer. We’d have to go out in two different cycles, and we were never able to get the solids completely dry like we do now. So we ran into timing problems. Sometimes we got caught with wet solids that we couldn’t really handle.

Then in 1996 we had a heavy rain year, and we weren’t able to get our second cycle out, so we had to hold it in the drying beds over the wintertime, which was hard to do. It really stressed our system out. That’s when they put together the citizen advisory committee and came up with the idea of dewatering to help with the drying process and to help speed it up, and that’s when the dewatering building and all of this came online. Around the same time, we purchased the biocycle farm. That gave us the ability to dry solids faster, to keep up with production, and to have a place to go with the solids where we had control over the timing. The flexibility to the program that we get from the biocycle farm was critical.

A lot of the weird stuff has been the different dead animals we’ve had to pull out of the lagoons. There’s been a few, all kinds of different ones. They get in there for whatever reason, you know? They think they can get out, but once you’re in there, those liners are so slick and wet, and then your feet are spinning, and there’s just no way out. We’ve saved a few animals too out of the lagoon. Saved a skunk out of there one time, that was interesting.

Very carefully! It didn’t spray us, we got lucky. It was pretty tired, and it was on the edge of the plastic liner. You could tell it was whipped from trying to get out, so it was just sitting there, and we were able to get a plank that we used for walking out from the lagoon edge to the dredge when it was parked on the side. We laid that down there until it could dry out enough in the sun to figure out how to walk up that plank, and it walked itself out of there. We stayed clear!

I think my favorite thing is just that I enjoy…I don’t know how to put this. It’s kind of like being a short-order cook, where you have all these different things that you can do, so I guess the variety of tasks that you can do on this job. I look back on it now, and it just kind of flew by. That’s 30 years of the same job, but it kept me entertained and challenged enough that I never got bored. If I would’ve got bored, I would’ve found something else to do. But I like the job, I like the area, and I love the people that I work with.

I used to play basketball and softball all the time. I coached my kids coming up through their sports, so I’ve coached a lot of teams in the area in football, basketball, baseball, and a little bit of soccer while my kids were growing up. So playing ball, coaching ball, and now that I’m older I golf and I bowl. I still have to have that competition because I…I have to have it. So that’s where I get it now. I bowl in a couple different leagues, one down in Cottage Grove and one here in Eugene. And I golf every chance I get.

Oh yeah, I was 4 years old when I moved out to Oregon. I was a Duck fan too, even back to the Kamikaze Kids and all that stuff, so the Oregon vs. Oregon State rivalry is big for me. Both of my sons went to games. We used to have season tickets for football, so we spent a lot of time at Autzen Stadium and the old Mac Court (McArthur Court). But Alabama was always my team.

I think the best piece of advice you can give anyone coming into this job is: be a good teammate and learn how to work as a team. Just do your job. Don’t always worry about what everyone else has to do; do your job. Everything I learned playing in sports translates into a work life. It’s the same kind of thing, just different tasks. Just do the right thing and be a good teammate.

Just that I appreciated all the people that I met along the way, and I always felt supported in this job here throughout my whole career, especially from MWMC and management here. The opportunities for training throughout my whole career, and – yeah. I enjoyed my ride immensely, but now I’m gonna go golf every day. 

Wipes break pumps. After your wastewater goes down the drain from your house, Eugene, Springfield, and the MWMC must pump that wastewater to the regional treatment plant where topography doesn't allow it to flow by gravity. When wipes, even ones that have been marketed as being “flushable”, get into those pumps, they can get caught and damage them, eventually causing them to stop working altogether, and potentially leading to backups and overflows. That’s why it’s crucial to always throw wipes in the trash! It’s one of the most important ways you can help keep our communities and waterways clean.

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