City Council weighs wastewater treatment for new prison, approves grant applications

The Lennox City Council met Monday, September 23 in the Lennox Boardroom. With all members present, council members heard agenda items including Department of Corrections discussions, grant applications and library fees.

The City of Lennox and South Dakota Department of Corrections (DOC) have been discussing and considering a potential connection of the new men’s prison to the Lennox Wastewater Treatment Facility. City Administrator, Nate Vander Plaats gave an update. 

Talks started on this project when VanderPlaats added it as a topic during the August 26 meeting after a failed vote in the City of Harrisburg. 

“This is simply an update on the discussions and work we are going through to see if this is a project in which we wish to engage. We continued discussions with Stockwell Engineers and reached out with the process engineers for our original SBR system at Xylem. Mitch is here tonight, we do have an updated technical memorandum in your packets for review that goes into a little more detail but our discussions with Xylem, we learned that some minor adjustments in our treatment cycle would allow us to treat a lot more wastewater than we originally thought,” Vander Plaats said. 

According to the technical memo, the DOC is initially proposing to send approximately 180,000 gallons of wastewater each day to the treatment facility with plans to expand this to approximately 225,000 gallons per day. This nearly doubles the current average flow of 250,000 gallons per day. The design flow of the current facility is 670,000 gallons per day which results in approximately 245,000 gallons of available capacity in the facility. However, some of the existing components are undersized and the following improvements are recommended to accept the additional wastewater from the DOC. The following addition improvements are recommended: equalization expansion, drying bed expansion, and aerated equalization tank. 

Alderman Chad Swier asked what will happen when Lennox grows exponentially in the next 15 years and the limit is reached that the plant can handle. 

“Assuming nothing changes with the plan, we’d go to an advance SBR or make other changes like add a basin,” Vander Plaats responded. 

Alderman Britney Mower asked if there was another treatment plant in the area that takes on this much water daily or comes from an industrial area or prison to view their procedures and gather more information from. Vander Plaats and Stockwell members are going to look into Sheldon and other towns in the area to see what their capacities are. Swier asked what size pipe would be used for the project and Vander Plaats and Stockwell Engineer, Mitch Mergen stated it would be up to the council to set requirements for the project when working with the state. The council thanked Stockwell for their time and will view other facilities.

The Lennox Area Ambulance submitted proposals for the Regional Services Designation Grant from the South Dakota Department of Health. 

“The grant itself would pay for a couple of items. The first is Guardian Angel safety lights. This is lights that EMT’s and paramedics would wear on their shoulder while they are on the shoulder of a roadway at night. Lots of close calls and I think you’ll see whether its Department of public safety or one of our local tow truck companies, there are a lot of risks when you are sitting on the side of the road. The other part of this would be the initial setup for the app called Handtevy. I was able to watch this in action the other night during the ambulance training, it’s pretty cool, it has all these set protocols and the reason it is regionalized grant applicable is because it sets up all the same protocols that all the Minnehaha services are using,” Vander Plaats said. Motion approved unanimously.

The City of Tea requested a letter of support for a grant from the Department of Health as well. 

“Their application is different than ours, they are applying for an EMS study to be conducted for Tea. As you know, currently Tea doesn’t have a permanent EMS provider with anyone. They don’t have a contractual agreement with any EMS provider. We do respond to a number of calls in their jurisdiction each year and we have very informally discussed the possibility of an eventual service expansion. This study will provide guidance and recommendations to Tea for how they should move forward with this,” Vander Plaats said. Motion approved unanimously.

The Lennox Library Board has requested an agenda item that makes clear any fees for non-resident users of the community library. 

“This is an interesting one, all we’re doing with this resolution is making it clear that we don’t charge non-residents fees for using our library,” Vander Plaats said. Resolution 2024-09-23-01 approved.

The City of Lennox has two iPads to dispose of and Resolution 2024-09-23-02 will allow the iPads to be rehomed or destroyed. 

“This is wrapping up the iPads we need to dispose of. Three were able to be cleared, two just need to be destroyed, we could not get into them at all. Two of these iPads can be allocated to the Lennox Area Ambulance to use with that new app and the other one goes to the fire department,” Vander Plaats said. Motion approved.