In an unusual cross-jurisdictional offer, Cayuga County officials want to give $15,000 to the Tompkins County village of Groton to pay for the first year of the use of a chemical that treats for phosphorus at its sewage treatment plant.

But a week after the April 21 deadline the county set for a reply from Groton, the county is still waiting for a formal response.

Indications are that Groton officials will likely decline the offer. The Groton plant is currently undergoing a complete review of its operating permit, called a State Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (SPDES) permit, under the auspices of the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

Steven Eidt, the DEC's Region 7 water engineer, said the Cayuga County offer was premature because the entire Groton operation is still under review, and the issue of phosphorus discharge downstream needs to be thoroughly studied before the state mandates a course of action to Groton officials.

“We're engineers by trade

in this,” Eidt said. “We need

to be sure what things mean before we go out to require municipalities to do anything. What we're doing is to work with

the municipalities to do pilot studies and look at what might be done.”

Phosphorus discharge and a limit for that discharge will be reviewed as part of the permit renewal process, he said. Permits last for five years, and Groton's current permit expires Aug. 1. No current phosphorus discharge level is set for the Groton plant.

No Groton officials responded to three messages left in the last week.

Eidt said anything testing below 20 micrograms per liter is within acceptable parameters. Owasco Lake has most recently tested at 13 micrograms per liter.

Cayuga County officials worry that, while the phosphorus levels in Owasco Lake have yet not surged over the 20-microgram-per-liter level, that it will surpass it if they wait longer to treat the phosphorus output coming through Groton's facility.

Worse, it won't allow for a reverse of phosphorus levels.

Twenty years ago phosphorus levels in Owasco Lake were close to six micrograms per liter and they have continued to steadily rise, said Cayuga County Environmental Engineer Bruce Natale.

“We don't want to degrade the lake more,” Natale said. “We don't want to get the number all the way up to 20. We want to do something now.”

The water that Groton treats flows through the Owasco Inlet and eventually into Owasco Lake, the water source for the city of Auburn and the towns that are hooked up to the city's water distribution system.

The phosphorus chemical treatment is actually a simple setup involving a 55-gallon barrel of

the treatment chemical and a pump.

Three wastewater plants in Cayuga County, located in

Aurora, Moravia and Union Springs, already are required

to have phosphorus removal,

said Eileen O'Connor, the county's director of environmental health.

It's only the latest effort county officials have made to try to reduce the phosphorus levels coming into the Owasco Lake watershed.

The county made its offer because of the widespread impact too much phosphorus can have in a lake's quality.

Phosphorus, a basic food for algae and other water plants, can lead to excessive weed growth and occasional algae blooms. More plant growth can reduce the level of oxygen available to fish and reduce the quality of fishing.

Too much plant growth can make boating a bother. When treated with chlorine, dying algae and weeds can lead to an off taste in drinking water.

The treatment with ferric chloride or a similar chemical could reduce the 2,500 pounds of phosphorus coming out of Groton by 1,500 to 2,000 pounds, Natale said. A single pound of phosphorus leads to 500 pounds of weeds, Natale added.

Last April's floods washed the phosphorus absorbed in the soil of the Owasco Inlet into the lake and lead to extensive weed beds, Natale said.

Because the lakes turns over twice in a year, moving north while doing so, all the phosphorus brought in through the inlet eventually spreads to the entire lake.

A 2003 testing by DEC officials based in Albany determined Groton did not need a permit for its release of phosphorus into the Owasco Lake watershed, Eidt said.

A permit assesses whether or not a plant is a significant source of a pollutant to a water body and what influence that particular pollutant has in that water body, he explained.

Natale and O'Connor also counter that other means of

reducing phosphorus are already being pursued: education programs to alert homeowners,

farm operators and golf course managers about reducing the runoff of phosphorus into the lake, inspection of septic systems and phosphorus removal at all three Cayuga County wastewater plants that discharge into a Finger Lake or Finger Lake watershed.

However, Groton has discharged excessive levels of total suspended solids (TSS), material like silt, decaying plant and animal matter, industrial wastes and sewage over what is allowed in its current permits.

But Natale does not prioritize that as high as the phosphorus issue.

He and other Owasco Lake advocates think phosphorus treatment at the Groton plant would be a single, inexpensive step to help with the lake's phosphorus levels.

“It's all our tax money at work so to speak,” said Al Kozlowksi, president of the Owasco Lake Watershed Association. “(Without dealing with phosphorus levels going through the Groton plant), there's very little we can do to affect water quality. It's like trying to improve gas mileage with one flat tire.”

The money offered to Groton comes from federal watershed protection funds.

Most of that money is

typically used to harvest

weeds, responding to the problem rather than preventing it, Natale said.

If the county's $15,000 offer is declined, it might be used for further testing to strengthen the case for phosphorus treatment at Groton, he said.

“We'd really like to work with our upstream neighbor and help them help us,” Natale said.

Staff writer Amaris Elliott-Engel can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 282 or at amaris.elliot-engel@lee.net