By Jennifer Edwards
The Cincinnati Enquirer

MIDDLETOWN - The city will pay a $45,000 fine for not properly storing sludge from its wastewater plant before disposing of it between 1998 and 2001.

City Council authorized City Manager Ron Olson late Tuesday to sign a federal consent decree with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over the violations. The unanimous vote to enter into the court order came without comment from Council.

The money for the fine will be pulled from the city's sewer fund, said Leslie Landen, Middletown's law director.

"We had sludge from the wastewater treatment plant and our method of disposing of that is to put it on farmers' fields," Olson explained. "Through the winter, there was rain and cold that kept that from happening. It stayed stockpiled longer than is allowed."

On June 24, the EPA sent Middletown an administrative complaint outlining the latest violations, alleging that the city stored bulk wastewater treatment sewage, also called sludge, on farmland for longer than the permitted time period.

The complaint also says the city hadn't measured the pH levels (the acidity) of the sludge at the prescribed 25 degrees Celsius, or without using the proper temperature-correction factor when measuring at a different temperature.

Federal regulators contacted the city after receiving complaints about odors from the sludge from neighbors and initially proposed a $68,000 fine, Landen said.

In July, the city denied the complaint in a response and requested it be dismissed. This week, Landen called the violations "close calls."

"Are there some technical violations? There probably are," Landen conceded. "Under the circumstances, they weren't necessarily something we had complete control over. There was a tremendous amount of weather impact on our ability to get the sludge spread."

The violations aren't the result of negligence and won't happen again, he added.

Late Tuesday, he told City Council the $45,000 fine was the best he could negotiate.

E-mail: jedwards@enquirer.com.