By Peak Johnson

Six sewage treatment plants across the Navajo Nation in Arizona have been violating Clean Water Act regulations for years, according to a new agreement between federal and tribal regulators and the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority (NTUA).

The U.S. EPA reported that facilities in Tuba City, Kayenta, Ganado, Navajo Townsite, Pinon, and Chinle in Arizona “were found to be discharging wastewater that exceeded pollutant and bacterial limits,” which poses human health risks and dangers to aquatic wildlife, reported the Arizona Daily Sun

The Sun reported that “other violations included inadequate staffing, wastewater that was released prior to full treatment, failure to submit complete and timely reports and generally inadequate maintenance and operation of the treatment systems.”

Under separate agreements with the U.S. EPA and the Navajo Nation EPA, NTUA came to an agreement to spend $6 million in order to get its treatment plants back into order.

These offenses are the latest among various violations that NTUA Deputy General Manager Rex Kontz “attributed in part to a reliance on immediate, band-aid-type fixes that failed to address the bigger problem.”

NTUA’s past violations “have been similar in terms of type and severity,” according to EPA spokesperson Margot Perez-Sullivan.

“We have a long history of us doing short-term compliance fixes that are short-lived, then we’re back in the same situation,” Kontz told the Arizona Daily Sun.

Kontz added that the root cause of the most recent violations is infrastructure age.

“The main thing is they are just old systems and the communities have grown,” he said. “The effect is that demand on the systems is beginning to exceed capacity.”

In addition to the improvements that are required by the EPA agreements, NTUA is planning on major renovation to its treatment plants in Kayenta and Tuba City in order to grow capacity and move them from lagoon systems to those that use chemical and mechanical digestion to treat wastewater, Kontz said.

The problem, however, is money. Securing the millions of dollars in grant funding and loans needed to cover such improvement costs so the entire burden doesn’t fall on ratepayers, Kontz added.

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