Town Lawsuit Pushes State to Resolve Prison Sewage Usage Issues

While the town is in negotiations with the state to resolve a lawsuit over sewage usage by the Cheshire Correctional Institution, the case is still making its way through the court system, Town Manager Michael Milone said Thursday.

The prison has for years been putting more sewage into the system than it is permitted for, which led to the town filing the suit. And while negotiations have taken place as recently as last week, there's no resolution in sight, Milone said.

"They have an agreement with the town that goes back to 1990 that says that they cannot exceed 350,000 gallons per day and they have consistently exceeded that for nine or 10 years," Milone said.

The state pays for whatever it discharges into the system, Milone said, but it is violating both the terms of its agreement with the town and its state permit. The town filed the law suit last summer.

"We met last week with members of the Department of Corrections and Attorney Generals office see if we could negotiate a settlement, but right now it's in court just sitting there," Milone said, "but in the meantime we are hoping to appeal to some of the state agencies to resolve this — we are hoping to sit down and negotiate a resolution."

One big sticking point, he said, is that the agreement the town has with the state does not include any provision that the state will kick in anything toward upgrades to the waste water treatment plant. The state does have that provision with other municipalities that host prison facilities, Milone said, but so far has refused such a provision with Cheshire.

"We are asking them to extend that same provision to our agreement," Milone said. "We are doing a $31 million upgrade to our treatment plant and the prison represents 25 percent of the effluence treated there so the state should pay 25 percent of cost.

"We negotiated and discussed it and they closed us out — they told us to go to the legislature, and we were unsuccessful there, the legislative branch turned us down and the executive branch turned us down," he said. 

There's legislation in the legislature that would require the state to renegotiate the contract, he said, that would render the lawsuit moot if passed, Milone said. The town also is asking that the permit requirements up the gallonage to 450,000 a day, he said. 

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