MINOA — It was announced this month that Minoa’s wastewater treatment facility will be receiving water infrastructure funding secured by the office of Congressman Brandon Williams.
The afternoon of Thursday, Sept. 5, the representative for New York’s 22nd congressional district went on a tour of the treatment plant at 100 Kalin Drive, where he presented the grant amounting to $565,000.
Part of a wave of community project funding Rep. Williams advocated for to be implemented during fiscal year 2025, the newly awarded grant will allow the Village of Minoa to continue upgrades and preventive maintenance for its wastewater facilities, measures which in turn will benefit every last resident of the village, Minoa Mayor Bill Brazill said.
Brazill said there’s a move toward adopting a more “proactive” approach and bringing technology at the plant to the most up-to-the-minute standard so that there isn’t as much of a stoppage if anything breaks down, but in the meantime ahead of any issues that arise, the pieces of equipment there will be properly taken care of to maximize their performance and ward off problems, the mayor added.
Going along with that, a new roof is going onto one of the treatment property’s buildings, and machinery like pumps, electrical motors and the bar screen that breaks up and processes waste will be replaced.
Williams, a trained nuclear engineer, said the $565,000 in congressional funding will bolster the treatment plant through “incremental improvements” that will help the workers avert crises and keep everything running no matter what while improving control systems for pumps and allowing for the most efficient power distribution possible.
The awarded money feeds into a $2.5 million plan the municipality put together for maintenance purposes and different improvements at its plant. Brazill said a chunk of the $565,000 will be used to introduce automation to the plant for greater reliability in its day-to-day operation.
“They’re really smart investments,” Williams said. “They’re planning and thinking ahead, not just reacting retroactively to the last crisis.”
Brazill said the importance of Minoa’s plant on Kalin Drive is illustrated by the fact that wastewater specialists and dignitaries hailing from countries the world over, including from Poland, Ukraine and Venezuela, have visited it to see its processes in action and bring their takeaways back to their countries.
Brazill said his predecessors in the Minoa mayoral seat John Regan and Dick Donovan would always publicly praise and go on at length about the sewage plant to the befuddlement of some who didn’t quite see why anyone would want to talk so much about sewage of all things, but now he talks up the plant the same way they did.
“I’m just so proud of that plant,” Brazill said. “I can talk all day about the innovative things we’e doing there. It’s so unique, and it’s huge any time we can get funding like this for it.”
Brazill said he expresses his sincerest gratitude for the support from Williams’ office and the “significant impact” the funding will have on the plant, which contains three biological reactors and services all of Minoa’s residents as well as East Syracuse Minoa Central School District buildings outside the village limits.
Following his personal tour of the treatment plant, Williams joined Brazill, Minoa trustees Eric Christensen and Bobby Schepp, ESM Superintendent Donna DeSiato and several of Minoa’s local business owners for lunch at Trappers II Pizza & Pub on North Main Street.
Williams said the way the treatment facility engages local students struck him as something special. For years, ESM has offered an environmental science course taught by John and Pam Herrington that’s tied in with the Cleanwater Educational Research Facility (CERF) and greenhouse at the wastewater treatment plant.
DeSiato said the class has been “life-changing” for students, citing as an example one graduate of the district who took it her senior year and went on to switch her desired career path because of it, later pursuing her doctorate in environmental studies.
Christensen said that certain students have appeared somewhat disinterested or flippant when they’ve first started taking the class, but by June they’re fully into it and “they’re like little professors with what they’ve learned.” Brazill added that he believes in a matter of only a couple of years or so, some of the best environmental engineers will be coming out of Minoa.
Overall, Williams referred to the wastewater treatment plant in Minoa as “a huge success story.”
“It’s a success as far as technically its treatment of wastewater, but it’s really also a success story for the community because they involve students, they’re training the next generation, and they’re innovating so that other municipalities even from all over the world actually come study what happens here, and that’s very unusual for a small municipality to have that kind of impact,” Williams said.
