The Wolfe County Sanitation District now has enough money to start the process to get a wastewater treatment plant in the eastern part of the county.
Most people in Wolfe County outside the county seat of Campton use septic systems for their wastewater.
Scott Lockard is the public health director for the Kentucky River District Health Department and the chairman of the Wolfe County Sanitation Board. He said some of the septic tanks are old and failing. Additionally, local large industrial users are on package wastewater treatment plants.
All these factors create a need in the community for wastewater to be addressed.
The Wolfe County Sanitation Board was formed in 2014 and has been trying to address the community’s wastewater needs since then. The Hazel Green Wastewater Treatment Project would build an entirely new facility to a part of the county that hasn’t had a treatment plant before.
“They have been working to try to secure funding to put in another wastewater treatment facility there in the community and to help Wolfe County with this big issue,” Lockard said.
In 2022, the group received $1.4 million from the Appalachian Regional Commission and in 2023, it received another $1.4 million from the Abandoned Mine Land program at the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Lockard said that was only about half the money the wastewater treatment project needed.
On Tuesday, the Wolfe County Sanitation District announced a $3 million grant for the Hazel Green Wastewater Treatment Project. Lockard said state Sen. Brandon Smith and Rep. Tim Truitt were the legislative leaders on getting this into the two-year budget this session.
“We are grateful to Governor Andy Beshear and his advisor Rocky Adkins, but Senator Brandon Smith really carried this project for us, and it is huge,” Lockard said.
The funding will become available on July 1.
“That money is ready for us to tap into now that we got this third piece of funding, and so all the project now will be ready to move forward,” Lockard said.
Until this grant from the state came through, the Wolfe County Water District hasn’t been able to use the funding it previously received. Now it can start all steps that come before breaking ground on the facility: the environmental studies, requests for proposals and other procedures.
“Our timeline is we needed it five years ago, so we're just going with the flow as quickly as we can do everything,” Lockard said. “According to the guidelines that’s laid out before us, we're moving as expeditiously as possible.”
He said realistically 18-24 months is the best case scenario, but an official timeline is hard to lay out.
The community announcement included local officials and representatives from LION Apparel and JSW Farm Chop Shop, two local industries that are hoping to expand in the Wolfe County community, Lockard said.
The Chop Shop is a meat processing plant and Lockard said the project will include a pretreatment plant for their wastewater before it gets treated at the larger wastewater facility.
Lockard said the treatment plant would allow LION and the Chop Shop to double in size and hire more people.
“This is just a much needed investment in infrastructure,” Lockard said. “It's going to provide jobs. It's going to provide economic development. It sets the stage for further growth. It allows for more affordable housing”
The wastewater treatment facility will also bring health benefits to the Wolfe County community.
Lockard said the county has a high percentage of people on Medicaid and some of the lowest outcomes based on social determinants of health. This wastewater treatment facility would help increase income and socioeconomic status with more jobs at local industries, which would then improve the social determinants of health.
“We still get reports of failing septic systems, and here, with some of the mountainous terrain, individuals may not have the room to properly repair a septic system, so it puts them really in a bind,” Lockard said. “This wastewater treatment facility and all the area that it's going to serve, this is truly huge for this entire region.”
