HANCEVILLE — The Hanceville Water and Sewer Board recently hired a private company to help bring the city’s treatment plant into compliance with state regulations.

At Tuesday’s water and sewer board meeting, members agreed to put Clear Water Solutions out of Montgomery in charge of the plant. The company is scheduled to start work April 1.

“We’ll take over all process control, maintenance and day to day operations of the plant,” said Rick Ailiff, president of Clear Water. “Hopefully we’ll help them with some problems. The overflow problem is the first thing we want to get on.”

On Jan. 25, ADEM gave the Hanceville plant a proposed $25,700 consent order for unpermitted sewage discharges. The board has spent more than $500,000 since November 2006 on system upgrades required by ADEM.

Hanceville currently has one on site operator and several workers employed at the plant. Aliff said he was not sure yet about what employment changes would be made.

“We’ll bring in a team of our individuals to see how many employees we need,” Ailiff said. “They have employees for 4 hours a day now. We plan to staff for 8 hours at a minimum. There will be a lot more technical support behind our staff.”

This is not the first time the board has hired outside help to manage the plant. The board hired Southwest Water Company out of Birmingham last year to oversee the installation of the equipment upgrades. The company had fully managed the plant from 1997 to 2003.

“All we’ve done since October (2006) … we were helping the city engineer … providing operating assistance,” said Grady Parsons, director of marketing for Southwest Water. “We were evaluating the treatment process.”

During the Tuesday board meeting, Southwest threw its hat into the ring to manage the plant.

Board member Hubert Jones said his fellow members decided to hire Clear Water despite Southwest’s previous experience because of the plant’s longstanding operational problems.

“We’re not really saving any money,” Jones said of the management change. “After talking with ADEM and other engineers … everybody feels like we are having operating problems so we decided to change operators.”

According to Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) reports, since Jan. 1, 2006 the plant has had eight instances of unpermitted discharges into Mud Creek that resulted from the release of biological sludge. Among the discharges was a 50,000 gallon release on Aug. 10, 2006, an 80,000 gallon release on Aug. 29, 2007 and a 100,000 gallon release on Sept. 14, 2007.

The treatment plant’s latest discharge occurred just over three weeks ago.

Ailiff said Clear Water would work hard to help the plant, but noted that changes would not happen overnight.

“But we feel that once we get there, we can make them (changes) happen,” he said.