Item A: City of Coburg Request for Connection to Regional Wastewater Facilities

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Relationship to Long-Range Regional Planning and Other Potential Extraterritorial Service Needs Part of SEL’s directive to staff in formulating this report was to consider Coburg’s request for wastewater services in the broader regional planning context, including potential future service requests from other small cities surrounding the Eugene-Springfield metropolitan area. Specifically, staff was directed to relate Coburg’s request to the Region 2050 planning study and its strategies for meeting the service demands of long-term regional growth. The relevance of this direction became real during the preparation of this report, because Regional Wastewater Program staff recently received an inquiry from Junction City staff regarding the possibility of receiving wastewater services. This section summarizes the relevant information available at this time, and the preliminary conclusions reached regarding efficient means of providing wastewater services throughout the Southern Willamette Valley. Eugene, Springfield, Lane County, and Coburg are parties to the Region 2050 planning study which is being undertaken to help establish a consensus for a preferred Regional Growth Management Strategy for the Southern Willamette Valley. The boundaries of the study area take in several communities beyond the Eugene-Springfield metropolitan area, including Coburg, Creswell, Veneta, Junction City, Goshen, Pleasant Hill, Westfir and others. The study models three potential growth scenarios for the future. These include: 1) a focus on “Compact Urban Growth,” with only modest expansion of UGBs to support future growth; 2) increased focus on expansion of “Satellite Community Growth” to support regional growth demands; and 3) increased “Rural Growth” to more closely approach urban levels of development in areas where rural resources (i.e., agriculture and forestry) are marginal. Wastewater services are among the services undergoing analysis within the Region 2050 planning study. The Rural Growth scenario would result in the least amount of new demand for sewerage services, because of the expected increase in rural residential development with on-site septic systems. However, regardless of which regional growth patterns emerge as preferred, Eugene-Springfield and several small communities in the area will require new and/or expanded wastewater collection and treatment facilities within the 2050 planning horizon. Some of the small neighboring communities, such as Veneta, Lowell and Creswell have or are in the process of constructing centralized wastewater services. Others, like Coburg and Goshen rely on private septic systems which will eventually need to be replaced by alternative systems, and a decision about how to best meet community wastewater treatment requirements will need to be made. Coburg’s poor groundwater situation (the area has been designated as a groundwater management zone by the DEQ due to high levels of nitrates in the groundwater) and resulting restrictions for planned industrial expansion, have led to the City being the first case to test the question and the preliminary conclusions reached by Region 2050 Technical Advisory Committee staff (TAC) who are providing wastewater systems planning analyses. It should be noted that the Region 2050 planning horizon extends a full 25 years beyond the current MWMC Facilities Plan, which establishes the treatment processes and capital improvement projects needed to meet community growth and environmental performance requirements within the Eugene-Springfield UGB through 2025. The vast unknowns regarding likely technological advancements in wastewater treatment, the Willamette River’s ability to assimilate increased pollutant discharges, and the levels of treatment that will be required to address environmental conditions this far into the future all make it fruitless to predict the technologies and cost-effective locations of new wastewater treatment facilities that will be developed to serve Eugene-Springfield between 2025 and 2050. The wastewater loads Page 3