Save the Illinois River Inc. | Environment | June 07, 2025
Sewage Day of Reckoning-The Arkansas Advocate
https://arkansasadvocate.com/2025/06/06/water-sewer-building-a-hot-subject-around-here-northwest-arkansas-consultant-says/
By: Jordan P. Hickey, Contributing Writer - Friday June 6, 2025
Building in some of Arkansas’ fastest-growing cities hit a wall last spring after the Arkansas Department of Health ceased approving any significant new projects.
Centerton and Highfill, two communities in the booming Northwest Arkansas region, grew by 7.2% and 15.2%, respectively, between July 1, 2023 and last July 1, according to the Census Bureau.
Both towns remain relatively small — just shy of 26,000 for Centerton and just under 3,000 for Highfill — but their exponential growth over the past three decades now poses a significant problem as an estimated 34 people move to the region every day: what to do with the sewage all those new residents and businesses produce.
That’s why the health department hasn’t approved a project in Centerton since May 2024. In a December letter, the department stated it would be “unable to approve any additional projects that will increase the flow of wastewater” to Decatur’s sewage treatment plant “until there is capacity available at the facility.”
As one developer said: “You’ll be looking at 1,000 open acres just primed for development, and you can’t do nothing with it because it has no infrastructure.”
The issue came into focus March 10 in a Centerton Utilities building conference. The presence of the Centerton and Decatur mayors at a water and wastewater planning meeting of Centeron’s Utilities Board highlighted the seriousness of the stakes.
Centerton doesn’t treat its own sewage. It sends it all to Decatur, population about 1,727, and therein lay the problem.
Decatur had plans to expand its wastewater plant’s capacity from 3.8 million gallons a day (MGD) to 5.25 MGD. Officials estimated that getting the health department to sign off on the plan would take six months or more, and with the specter of tariffs potentially doubling the projected cost, an already significant delay threatened to become even more drawn out.
That’s why Centerton’s officials were looking at other solutions. The first option, with a $5.7 million price tag, would involve diverting some of Centerton’s sewage to Bentonville. But as utilities board members acknowledged, there were questions about whether Bentonville’s mayor would be amenable to the idea.
The second option involved linking to the Northwest Arkansas Conservation Authority (NACA) wastewater collection system. The cost: $14 million — $10 million for connection and capacity fees and $4 million for capital costs like pipe. That doesn’t cover the cost of actually treating the sewage.
“Water, sewer building, it’s a hot subject around here,” said Jeff Dehnhardt, director of Water & Wastewater Engineering with ESI, Centerton’s engineering consultant. “I think everywhere in the region is experiencing the impact of all of the growth in Northwest Arkansas, and none of it is free.”
“The day of reckoning has come,” said utilities board member Robert Anderson.
Out of mind
More than three decades ago, Northwest Arkansas leaders saw the proverbial writing on the wall and began preparing the region for its current growth.
The Northwest Arkansas Council, a nonprofit established in 1990 by business leaders like Sam Walton, Don Tyson and J.B. Hunt to help promote the region, tackled infrastructure priorities like a new airport, XNA, because fog-bound Drake Field affected business travel.
Because many small towns struggled with adequate water supply, the Two-Ton Water System (aka the Benton/Washington Regional Public Water Authority) became another council priority.
Interstate 49 was a priority because businesses needed to be able to transport goods in and out of the region.
But wastewater was a few rungs down the ladder of priorities.
Water and wastewater systems “especially the pipeline systems … they’re out of sight, out of mind,” said Celine Hyer, co-author of the wastewater chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure. As a result, they’re not getting the money needed to refurbish or rehabilitate them “because nobody sees them,” she said.
That’s part of the reason America’s wastewater infrastructure received a D+ in the report card, Hyer said.
But deficiencies and a lack of capacity underfoot begin to have effects aboveground.
Wakeup call
Last fall, Northwest Arkansas Council CEO Nelson Peacock said he started hearing about a looming sewer system crisis from developers, city officials, businesses, the Arkansas Department of Health, and others.
“That’s when we felt, ‘Wow, this is a little bit more than we saw.’ And so we need a regional approach,” he said.
“Every city, and every issue, has its own story of how and why it got there,” Peacock said. A master plan, which could take up to 24 months to complete, “is really the only way to help us get a handle on this and to help cities make the best decisions. Because all those decisions are going to impact others,” he said.
Northwest Arkansas has been here before
In 2002, the region’s municipalities were facing pressure to expand water treatment plants and increase wastewater discharge to reduce phosphorus levels in the Illinois River and tributaries like Osage Creek. That prospect — coupled with 20-year growth projections showing the region’s population more than doubling, “run[ning] together to become like a regional metroplex” — was reason enough to look for solutions, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported.
Their solution? The Northwest Arkansas Conservation Authority, or NACA.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Mike Masterson compared the authority to the development of Beaver Lake in the 1950s. Former 3rd District Congressman Jim Trimble “and other visionaries saw 70 years into the future when the Beaver Water District was formed to deal with the entire area’s projected water needs,” Masterson wrote. “Forming NACA is close to what occurred when the Beaver District was formed.”
The conservation authority was meant to encourage cities to pool their resources. At the time, area cities were considering as many as six new wastewater treatment plants in the Illinois River watershed (Fayetteville was the only one that had moved forward with a new plant, which opened in 2008).
In the 1970s, the federal government offered grants for sewage plants with a regional focus. Those incentives went away during the Reagan years, but supporters could point to regional and local successes.
One was the Beaver Water District, which a Northwest Arkansas Conservation Authority organizer praised for “regionally allocating lake water to area towns and cities.”
When the conservation authority started up, Rogers and Springdale were the only members. By fall 2005, with talk of a regional treatment plant materializing, eight more municipalities had signed up: Bentonville, Bethel Heights, Cave Springs, Centerton, Highfill and Lowell in Benton County, and Elm Springs and Tontitown in Washington County.
But less than a week after the June 2009 groundbreaking, the Democrat-Gazette reported, Bentonville and Tontitown “will be the only cities initially served by Northwest Arkansas’ first regional sewer plant, and it’s likely to be a good while before others join the $68 million project.”
Among the reasons: Rogers had finished an expansion of its own wastewater plant just two months before.
“NACA is way, way down the road,” said Mayor Perry Long of Lowell, which already sent its sewage to plants in Springdale and Rogers.
Elm Springs and Cave Springs used septic-tank effluent pumps that still had plenty of capacity.
“We’re good for probably the next 20 years,” said Rene Langston, Springdale Water Utilities director.
‘No consequences’
Even though the NACA facility was “a very bold and good decision, there were no consequences” for the municipalities that pulled out, said Lane Crider, Beaver Water District CEO.
“I’m not gonna say [it was] a mistake, but you know, it was certainly something that has hampered the ultimate success and future development of that facility.”
George Spence, a member of the authority’s board from around 2003 to 2021, said coming together as NACA was a way to “take care of our own communities. But it was always going to be based on the individual cities wanting to come, not any kind of overriding authority to control that decision.”
Spence said he didn’t think a state-imposed regional plan would have worked “because you wouldn’t have had any political support. Nobody, nobody, nobody from the individual communities would have wanted to sign up for giving up their ability to control, to determine their future.”
Other pressures posed challenges to regional authority’s success. In early 2009, the EPA stated the plant could discharge no more than 0.1 milligram of phosphorus for each liter of treated sewage by 2012. The authority had been planning to build a plant that would discharge 10 times that amount into Osage Creek.
NACA’s plant was completed in 2010 in Highfill for $65 million with the capacity to treat 3.6 MGD.
Planners thought they’d need 80 MGD by 2060, but “you can’t go ahead and build that capacity because paying for it would start before that supply caught up to demand,” Spence said. They’d also have to consider the impact on rates, permit approval and accessing federal or state money, he said.
In 2017, the authority began exploring an expansion to double the plant’s capacity to 7.2 MGD, Plant Director Mike Neil said. A $55 million loan from the state was expected to cover the cost (plus the cost to fix a faulty pipeline). In 2022, the agency asked for an additional $20 million loan to cover rising building costs associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Construction proceeds on an expansion of the Northwest Arkansas Conservation Authority wastewater treatment plant in Highfill in early June 2025. (Photo by Arshia Khan for Arkansas Advocate)
Construction proceeds on an expansion of the Northwest Arkansas Conservation Authority wastewater treatment plant in Highfill in early June 2025. (Photo by Arshia Khan for Arkansas Advocate)
Neil said they hope to have the expansion completed by mid-summer, with a final cost of $80 million.
Even as smaller communities have begun to tie into the conservation authority’s system — Cave Springs linked up this spring; Highfill is about a month and a half out — the problem has been a lack of master plans that project the needs of the entire region.
“One of the big issues that all of the littler cities have is that there’s not a master plan,” Neil said. Smaller cities “never had to contend with anything like this before. There just hasn’t been a need for it.”
‘Plenty of capacity’
Centerton Utilities Director Malcolm Attwood said the impending lack of capacity from wastewater infrastructure had really only been on their radar “since early 2024.”
Centerton’s 1.27 MGD should have been a drop in the bucket for Decatur’s 3.8 MGD plant to handle. But Decatur also receives sewage from the Simmons Foods poultry processing plant, an average 3.05 million gallons a day, according to the latest available data. That, coupled with population growth, means Decatur can’t take any more sewage.
“I think the previous director and our commission thought they had plenty of capacity in Decatur,” Attwood said. “We knew we were all growing. I just don’t think we knew at the rate they were growing, and what Simmons was going to be doing … that’s kind of how we got in this position.”
Not everything has ground to a standstill, however. With Bentonville facing its own water woes — and $103 million in infrastructure improvements, according to the Bentonville Bulletin — Centerton had opted to tie into NACA, Attwood said in late May. It’s now a matter of funding.
“We’ve got to figure out how we’re gonna come up with the money, whether it’s increased rates, or get a bond, or both.” It’s possible they could use the one-to-one match offered by the recently signed Act 812, which created a state matching grant program for shovel-ready water and wastewater infrastructure projects, but he said he expected it to be “very competitive.”
Malcolm Attwood, director of Centerton, Arkansas, utilities, says progress has been made in finding somewhere to send the fast-growing city's wastewater.
Future growth and wastewater infrastructure
The Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission is scheduled to meet Friday with city leaders from Bentonville, Centerton, Decatur, Gentry, Gravette and Highfill to discuss “future growth and wastewater infrastructure treatment planning in this part of Benton County.”
Planning Commission Executive Director Tim Conklin said the meeting is aimed at improving awareness and understanding. This becomes especially important as the smaller communities outside the larger cities absorb even more growth. Northwest Arkansas is projected to add 130,000 people between 2020 and 2030, compared to 100,000 in previous decades. Conklin noted that smaller communities like Pea Ridge and Highfill are seeing even higher growth rates, 17% and 15%, than Centerton.
Communication matters more than ever, Conklin said, “because we can have very large national home builders show up and double the population of one of the small cities with one development.”
“We don’t have one big central city that understands everything that’s happening within their community… we have multiple communities sharing the same infrastructure, and so people that own and operate and maintain that infrastructure need to have a really good understanding of what’s happening outside of their own city,” Conklin said.
Naturally, that brings up questions: Namely, who’s going to pay for the necessary infrastructure? And how fast will they be able to build it?
“Those are all very good questions,” Conklin said. The commission is seeking a consultant to answer those questions over the next 18-24 months, he said. Once completed, the Northwest Arkansas Comprehensive Study of Wastewater Management and Needs in Benton and Washington counties will include:
Estimated costs of recommended capital improvements to accommodate projected employment and population growth, with a breakdown of responsibilities by city and/or utility over the next 25 years.
A prioritized implementation plan for wastewater improvements, including recommended public financing options.
Public presentations in multiple forums to communicate the region’s wastewater needs and priorities.
Asked how this might be different from previous regional efforts, including a similarly titled plan published in 1974, Conklin said, “When you get to the point of not being able to move forward with additional housing and additional employment growth, job creation, it has to. We’ll get together, and we will work together to figure that out.”
