The Village of Wilson is no longer on the hook to pay New York State for a study of its wastewater treatment plant.
According to Mayor Arthur Lawson, the state’s Lake Ontario Resiliency and Economic Development Initiative, Environmental Facilities Corporation and Department of Environmental Conservation have forgiven the village for more than $500,000 of grant funding spent on a since-canceled project that would have outsourced wastewater treatment to the Town of Newfane and decommissioned its own treatment plant.
“Basically (they) allowed the final deliverable product to be the study that was done to be useable for a future wastewater treatment plant. So it’s done and over now,” Lawson said.
With that determination, the village became responsible for contributing 5% of the study cost, which was paid to the state at the time of the study, village trustee Greg Martin said.
In 2019, the village secured $4.6 million through REDI to cover most of the cost of the wastewater treatment outsourcing project. An engineering study was done and then construction was delayed due to the Covid pandemic. In the interim, the overall project cost increased by $2 million. That, on top of the fact that the village is still paying back a $1.6 million loan for previous upgrades to the treatment plant that would not have been forgiven by the state if the plant was demolished, caused a majority of the village board to vote to halt the project.
“The unsure outcome of expenses would have been too difficult to swallow for us,” Martin said.
Canceling the project after accepting and using some of the grant money put Wilson in a situation that neither the village nor the state “had ever been in” previously, Lawson said.
In September, the village submitted a new proposal to New York State to reapply for a $4.81 million grant to make improvements to sewers and the existing treatment plant in lieu of the original project.
That proposal was rejected by the state in November, because the new project did not fall under the grant guidelines.
“it was a dash to the finish line from September through November. It was quite stressful,” Lawson said.
Village officials said they are ultimately grateful that they are no longer responsible for paying back the money that was spent on the study and while they are still interested in making treatment plant upgrades in the future, no plans to do so are imminent.
“You got to really appreciate what the governor did for Niagara County, because the REDI commission was something that was created in a spur of the moment. So we were all learning as we were doing it,” Lawson said.