City of Hastings leaders stressed that changes could be made to plans for placement of water treatment plants and they have preliminarily been located on city-owned sites to make the PFAS remediation plan cost effective.
Concerns were raised by the public in the Wallin Park neighborhood that one of three treatment plants the city has in initial planning to build would be located there. The building size was put at 100x100 feet and 50-feet high.
Because of new federal standards adopted by the state earlier this spring, the city has five years to have treatment facilities in place to filter PFAS from the drinking water supply.
The city is working through various funding alternatives and is hoping to have an answer by late summer. A worst case scenario option is that city water rates would have to support building the facilities. Minnesota Pollution Control is monitoring samples from areas of Hastings in an effort to find the source of the PFAS. 3M in Cottage Grove is known to have discharged the forever chemicals used in their manufacturing process, but a definitive link has yet to be made, though one city well contains a PFAS chemical unique to 3M. As of now, Hastings hasn’t been granted access to money from the 3M Settlement Fund.
Mayor Mary Fasbender told the crowd assembled in a garage at a home across from Wallin Park at a neighborhood meeting that other sites will be looked at, rather than Wallin Park.
One resident said, “I’d like a commitment from you tonight that you’re going to do the best not to have it build here at this park.”
Fasbender replied, “You will have my commitment.”
She said the city is in a difficult position.
“Our concern is 23,000 people. How do we get safe drinking water to all of them. We are doing the best we can. We have been working on this. Our staff has been working on it. We’ve been working with the legislature. We have been trying to get the money. We are listening to you. We want it to be the best answers for everybody,” she said.
Concerns were raised about a variety of issues, from the size of the building to its effect on property values and the fact that the park is meant for recreational purposes.
City Administrator Dan Wietecha told the crowd that nothing is finalized with a Wallin Park site and that it wouldn’t be the first of the treatment plants built. That is planned for in the Hastings Industrial Park.
“If we’re building a plant a year for three years, this one’s a couple of years out anyways. I know that there’s a lot of questions and obviously there’s some recognition that a treatment plant is a large building,” he said. “We have not started design and don’t even intend to start design for the third plant at Wallin or in a different location for at least another year.”
Wietecha said the Wallin site was identified because the city was looking for a site for a future well about a dozen years ago and a test well showed that a new well would work there. Also, the city already owns the land and park land can be used for other municipal purposes as well.
He said the city has explored several options to treat for PFAS contamination, including hooking up to St. Paul’s water system and building one large treatment plant that would require significant infrastructure work to pipe to all parts of the city.
“The most cost effective way is building three plants and locating them across the city,” he said.
City land was chosen as proposed sites.
“If it’s on city land, we don’t have to buy land. We don’t have to go through the time and process for acquiring property,” he said.
Of Wallin Park, he said, “It’s not locked in. It’s not written in stone, but it is the identified location.”
City councilmember Lisa Leifeld said the neighborhood will be notified when decisions need to be made.
“The city does that on all of their projects, as they’re getting to the point of planning. We’re not even there yet. Those letters will come to homeowners,” she said.
She thanked the residents for having the meeting and speculated that similar meetings could be held at other geographic locations of the project.
“Having this sort of meeting is amazing. It helps us understand better, how everyone’s feeling,” she said. “For me, my concern is really just about the safety of the area. We want it to look good. There’s a number of us on the council who will be saying, ‘Hey, we want to look at other options.’ This was the most obvious option one, not necessarily the only option.”
The meeting was at the home of Rebecca Stoffel.
“I think the public was able to share their frustrations over the lack of transparency in the project, and I feel the public was able to ask some good questions. It was appreciated that the city administrator, the mayor and councilmembers came to hear our questions and frustrations over the proposed plans.”