Council formalizes agreement for DelGrosso plant to send wastewater to Borough treatment plant

At its September 11 meeting, Council put a formal vote behind an agreement that lets the DelGrosso plant send its wastewater to the Borough’s treatment plant. The action ratified a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that Council had already approved earlier by an email vote, making the decision part of the official meeting record.

What a ratification does

Between regular monthly meetings, Council sometimes needs to act on a time-sensitive matter and does so by email. Pennsylvania’s open-meetings rules expect those decisions to be confirmed in a public session, so the email approval of the MOU was brought back to the September meeting for an on-the-record vote. The substance of the agreement did not change; the ratification simply gives it the standing of a formal Council action.

How an outside discharge works

A Memorandum of Understanding sets out the terms under which one party may send flow to a public treatment system — things like what may be discharged, how it is monitored, and how the costs are handled. When a large source like a food-processing operation discharges to a municipal plant, the arrangement is governed by federal pretreatment rules administered through EPA’s National Pretreatment Program and enforced in Pennsylvania with oversight from the PA Department of Environmental Protection. Those rules exist to keep the strength and volume of incoming wastewater within limits the plant is permitted and equipped to treat, protecting both the treatment process and the waterway that receives the plant’s discharge.

Tyrone owns and operates its own wastewater system, so an agreement of this kind is a routine but important piece of managing what reaches the plant.

On record: the Memorandum of Understanding and this ratifying vote are part of the public meeting record at the Borough Office, 1100 Logan Avenue. Learn more about the federal rules that govern industrial discharges to municipal plants through EPA’s National Pretreatment Program.