We have been providing wastewater engineering services to the Village of Mount Horeb since the 1980s. Because of rapid growth throughout the village, Mount Horeb hired us to complete a comprehensive facility plan for its Water Pollution Control Facility (WPCF). This plan resulted in recommendations for significant improvements, effectively doubling the capacity of the facility by utilizing both existing structures on the site and building new processes on an adjacent site. The new WPCF is sized to serve the village for several decades, providing reliable and operator-friendly treatment with operational flexibility to meet current and future effluent limits.

The Village also faced implementation of a more stringent water-quality-based phosphorus effluent limit. The Village chose adaptive management for compliance with this more stringent limit. Rather than complying with the stringent water-quality-based effluent limit (0.075 mg/L) by utilizing tertiary treatment at the facility, adaptive management focuses on implementation of watershed-based projects to improve overall water quality in the receiving waterbody. Adaptive management provides a 20 year schedule from implementation to compliance, with compliance defined as the receiving water body meeting the water quality criteria.

The new WPCF includes biological nutrient removal with backup chemical phosphorus facilities for removal of most of the influent total phosphorus. By selecting adaptive management, the Village was able to avoid construction of a costly tertiary filtration process at the facility. The Village has already implemented watershed projects – we assisted the Village with conversion of about 20 acres of Village-owned land into perennial grasses and pollinator habitat, providing multiple environmental benefits. The benefit of these improvements extend beyond the Village as they help achieve Dane County’s goals for water quality improvement within the watershed County-wide.