Medford Mayor expects city to be fined by state

Medford Mayor Danny Thomas spent his first 60 days in office trying to right the ship while facing a barrage of issues.
Some of those issues, Thomas attributes to past mistakes or policies, while others, he said,  are issues that face every municipality.
“The public has pushed me to a point where I need to let them know what’s going on,” Thomas said. “I need to let everyone know that this is where we stand right now in Medford, and we’re going forward.”
According to Thomas, he and his team will be tackling every challenge one at a time. One of the most pressing issues facing the city when he came into office was replacing former Administrator Andy Welti, who resigned on Dec. 22.
“We replaced him on Jan. 30,”  Thomas said. There have also been a few other staffing changes, including the public works supervisor who resigned his position to stay on as a regular public works employee.
In November, the employees of the City of Medford decided to join the Local 49 Union. Four full-time city employees joined the union, and talks are still early. “It is in discussion, and it is in mediation,” Thomas said. “That’s where it’s at; nothing has been decided.”
Thomas said the staff was being poorly utilized before his administration. “The employees were told not to communicate with each other,” he said. “That has now changed, and I can tell you that the employees are running this city and they need to communicate with each other to the full extent.”
“I believe the staff was undertrained in many areas and uncertified in many areas,”  Thomas said. “We need to build a team together, and that’s my goal with the staff. We need to bring them all on board as a team. We are going to work on getting employees certified.”
Thomas partly attributes the two state violations that occurred under the previous administration to the staffing issues. “There are two state violations, one for April of 2020 and one for 2019,” he said. “In April 2020, they had a check valve go bad, and 40,000 gallons of biosolids went into the river. That’s a lot.” The first violation in April 2019 was due to insufficient hydrogen levels in the water.
The primary cause of the biosolids spill is the city being bereft of a grinder. “We had learned that at some point in time, the grinder unit had been taken out of the plant; that’s about a $100,000 piece of equipment,” Thomas said. “It grinds up all the material that goes through the plant, so that material got into the check valves. The check vales failed, and down the river it goes.”
There was also a spill that was unreported to the state on Dec. 28, 2020. “I think this goes back to people not knowing they had to report it or to report and not being qualified to know the terms,” Thomas said.
Luckily that spill went on top of the ground and was caught in time. “We then got a letter from the state stating that concerning the two previous violations in both April 2019 and April 2020 from the water to the wastewater, the city had not given any answer back to the state on why they happened,”  Thomas said. “They said that they had not received a plan.”
“We proceeded to put in a plan for the state and we do believe that we’re going to get fined,”  Thomas said of the two previous water violations. “These potential fines coming from the state are real and people need to realize that we’re in the process right now.”
Thomas is looking to improve the plant as it stands now before deciding on the city’s future water and wastewater plan. “The wastewater plant has had no preventative maintenance done on it for years, including cleaning the buildings and the tanks inside and out. It’s a maintenance nightmare,” he said. “It needs to be thoroughly gone through top to bottom, which is what we’re in the process of doing now.”
The city is also in the process of mending strained relationships. “We’re trying to build relationships again with the City of Owatonna,” Thomas said. “We want to get an option to meter water on the west side of the freeway so that if we have any development to come along there, we’d have a meter in place that we could get the water from.”
“I want this to be a positive thing, but these are muck ups, they’re all muck ups, and they’re stuff that we have to deal with as a city, and I’m going to bite them off one bite at a time,” Thomas said. “It’s a mountain right now for Medford.”
Thomas said his team is helping to start that trek up the mountain. “Each one of the council members has done their own thing: Chad Langeslag is doing a great job with all of these wastewater issues, and Grace Bartlett has helped out with the Medford Muni and the EDA with the Outlet Center,” he said.
City employees are all starting to jump on the bandwagon.
“I think Danny has big plans for the city and he’s going to utilize the strengths that every one of us employees has, and the city is going to benefit out of that,” Medford City Clerk Elizabeth Jackson said. “If you hire someone for a job because they’re qualified to do it, then you need to let them do it and bring their skills to the table.”
“I do think that the public feels that it is way more informed of what’s going on and as we get settled and everything starts to get into a rhythm and a routine, I think you’re going to see the citizens get a lot happier,” Jackson said. “I think we’re moving in the right direction.”
 
 
Photo: Medford Mayor Danny Thomas says he expects the city to be fined by the state for two wastewater treatment plant violations that occurred under the previous administration.