Updated 3 pm
Groundwater that was being pumped into the town’s sewer system illegally is now being diverted into a new leaching field installed at the Mansion House Inn, Josh Goldstein, the hotel’s manager, confirmed in an email to The Times.
“Mansion House has continued to work with the knowledge and approval of the Town of Tisbury to resolve the groundwater issue,” Goldstein wrote. “With the assistance of our engineers and the town, the project has been completed.”
In an email town administrator Jay Grande confirmed the work by engineer Reid Silva of Vineyard Land Survey and Engineering, the hotel’s contractor, was completed.
Edmund Coletta, a spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), wrote in an email Friday that his agency hasn’t been notified of the project’s completion. “We had been informed that a new storm drainage system (the ‘leaching’ system to which you refer) was being constructed.”
The town first discovered the illegal sewer hookup during a visit to the hotel in May. Last month, the town updated the state Department of Environmental Protection on the issue.
Groundwater that infiltrates the hotel and is used in a geothermal heating system was being pumped into the town sewer system at an estimated 15,000 gallons per day. Because the town bills sewer users based on water usage, the Mansion House was not paying for that additional flow into the wastewater treatment plant.
In a previous interview, Goldstein, who is a member of the town’s sewer advisory committee, was unable to say how the hookup to the town system came to be or how long the groundwater has been pumped into the town system. In May, the Mansion House briefly attempted to divert the groundwater into another leaching system on the hotel property, but it was quickly overwhelmed causing street flooding in the area.
Town records show the Mansion House paid $89,653 in sewer fees in 2019, an average of 22,413 per quarter.
Updated with a comment from the DEP.
With the pandemic effects on our local population numbers and a meaningful drop in the 2020 summer population, the wastewater plants on the island have been adversely impacted by the need for less concentrated effluent to help the plants “digest” the on-site septic system pump-outs, leading to the inability to service existing needs for on-going on site septic system maintenance. One sees daily seepage haulers trucking wastewater off island now at a huge expense. Given the need for clean water to the plant and the lack of a need for treatment of the kind of ground water that was being pumped into the Tisbury system, one could argue that the situation at the Mansion House was actually doing the Town a favor, given that the plant keeps track of its daily flow numbers at the plant and is nowhere near a critical peak flow concern. That water infiltrating the Mansion House was ground water, akin to well water, which needs no treatment, save for potentially thermal cooling. While however the connection occurred was wrong, that water was, in a way, a gift that helped overall operations in one critical respect. The plant needs a regular low concentration effluent flow to be able to “dissolve” seepage waste into the overall “waste” numbers to allow fr more local on-site pump outs to be treated. To the extent there was some level of knowledge at the plant of this anomalous flow, such an event should have been more transparent, but hardly takes on the level of conspiracy or effort to avoid fees that your paper suggests. The wastewater billing is based on water drawn from the water district which flows through the hotel’s piping picking up waste in need of treatment. The treatment needs are the basis of billing, so to suggest that clean water being introduced from ground water flow was avoiding a treatment fee is overstating the impact on the Town.