Owatonna officials table action on Lakeside
Owatonna city council members voted on Jan. 16 to table action on an incident at Lakeside Foods that resulted in untreated wastewater flowing into the city’s wastewater treatment plant.
“This will allow staff some additional time to meet with Lakeside officials and have some more dialogue,” city administrator Kris Busse said.
President Greg Schultz offered company representatives the chance to address the council.
Lakeside Vice President of Operations Mark Enter said about 125 families make their living working at the Owatonna facility.
“We are proud of our operation here and our employees, and the wholesome food products that we make here. We are proud of our relationship with the city,” he said. “In fact, that’s what troubles us is the action being considered doesn’t seem to be representative of that relationship, which has always been very positive and collaborative, and we want to maintain that relationship.”
During a Jan. 2 study session, city officials reviewed a draft notice of violation related to wastewater issues between July 31 and Sept. 28 at the company’s Owatonna plant. Lakeside has occupied the 1920s-era facility on North Cedar Avenue since purchasing it from Chiquity in 2003.
City engineer Sean Murphy said then that the violation was discovered when digesters and aeration basins that process wastewater were running at full capacity. After a process that included testing at several lift stations and the use of dye tablets, city staff determined an old, illegal connection at Lakeside Foods was causing the problem.
“It was a buried manhole about three feet deep,” Murphy said at that time. “What we surmise is that there was a bulkhead on that line that somehow came loose” because of time or as the result of Lakeside televising and jetting its system.
The manhole was closed off at the end of September, Murphy said.
Documents outlined the actual cost of the untreated wastewater that discharged into the city’s system, costs of tracking down the leak and legal consulting, and the administrative fee. Lakeside could face total costs of $583,319.02, which include $216,000 in administrative penalties that city officials have talked about forgiving.
However, Enter said Tuesday that the problem was “a hole in the city’s sewer pipe.”
“We worked quickly and collaboratively with the city to patch that hole in the city’s pipe, and at Lakeside’s expense,” he said, “and then we took some additional action to ensure that kind of comingling of waters never happens again.”
In an interview, company spokesperson Anne Smith said the city first contacted Lakeside in mid-August to ask whether there had been process changes but didn’t ask for the company to take any action. The buried manhole that the city has called an “illegal connection” was likely established sometime the 1920s and may have been legal at that time, she said.
Once the problem was identified, Lakeside had it corrected within 12 hours. Enter told council members he happened to be in Owatonna the day the repair was made and “was proud to hear how we worked together to fix the problem so quickly.”
He said the company and its employees “want to be good corporate citizens.”
“We care about the environment that we earn our living from and live in, and we always want to do right by our employees, by our neighbors, by the farmers who grow food for us, by the residents of this community, by everyone that we work with,” Enter said. “We are grateful that you tabled this until we can meet and work through it.”