After many years of relative indifference to the pollution increasingly engendered by the number of sewage outlets into the tiny stream named South Brook (dubbed "Sewer Brook" by many Ashfield residents) which runs through the middle of the town, the Federal government, having warned the town for a number of years about the need for action, finally stepped in, threatening the town with large fines for every day a decision was put off to come up with a proposal for a new treatment plant. The town's response created exciting new prospects and alarming new problems.
In May, 1987, the people of Ashfield, assembled in its annual Town Meeting, voted to build a new solar-aquatic wastewater treatment plant by a margin of 98%! Their enthusiasm was captured by a stunningly creative vision of a facility in which the management of raw sewage could be transformed into a linked greenhouse-based plant, the upper one filled with aeration tanks topped by flowering vines, teeming with tilapia and other live fish swimming happily in their protein-rich waters, the effluent from this one filtered down into a lower marsh greenhouse which would be a habitat for many wonderful plants, birds and animals where the townspeople of Ashfield, wearied by the dark and cold of a long New England winter, could walk through a jungle-like profusion of plant and animal life, flooded with moist warm sunlight amid towering cattails, papyrus, banana, fig and citrus trees, smelling the sweet white ginger flowers along the path that meandered through the marsh while tiny birds flew freely overhead and frogs and turtles basked in the flowing water of a little fountain.
It has taken over two years for the plant which arose in response to this vision to begin to fulfill its initial promise, and the solar technology which monitors and regulates the effluent, being highly innovative and relatively untried on this scale, has been both a nightmare of construction and reconstruction and a miracle of performance! Like a circus rider learning how to maintain a precarious balance on his careening horse, the operator of the plant has had to learn to balance all the many delicate programs and facets which interact in intricate ways which have required both extensive re-tooling and exquisite fine-tuning throughout this initial period in order to work out a set of working protocols for keeping the running of the elaborate interactive mechanisms it takes to make it work smoothly!
In the beginning there were failures of sub-systems, break-downs, even a flood in the basement of one Ashfield household because of a power failure! - and it has cost far too much in spite of heroic efforts to keep costs down! But the wonder is that the plant works at all, let alone that it works now as well as it does, meeting all DEP requirements for wastewater effluents! The water that flows from the lower greenhouse after its passage through the marsh is virtually of drinking water quality! This has been accomplished by extraordinary day-to-day vigilance, know-how and dedication involving a great deal of work, on-the-spot inventions and constant consultations with the town's Sewer Commissioners, the Massachusetts DEP (Department of Environmental Protection), EEA (Ecological Engineering Associates), the design engineers - Weston & Sampson, the plant engineers - and many local companies , by its operator-superintendent, Tom Leue!
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.BUT ...... as time went by, this new age miracle turned more and more into a nightmare of controversy and staggering costs to the town of Ashfield and its village dwellers! Sewer bills were so high for them that many people simply could not or would not pay their bills! At one juncture the town even proposed attaching the property of sewer bill delinquents.
Tom Leue and the Sewer Commissioners became increasingly at swords' points over a variety of issues: in the beginning, over the enormity of the gap between DEP emissions standards and the plant's ability to meet them! - then later, as that gap grew smaller as a result of Tom's heroic retooling efforts, over the veracity of Tom's reports of his testing data - but really, over Tom's efforts to lay responsibility for shortcomings and enormous cost overruns on major design issues devolving into the credibility of Weston and Sampson, backed by the DEP representative for western Massachusetts versus the environmental design engineering firm, EEA. The heated disputes which had become standard aspects to the meetings between the commissioners and Tom became increasingly focused on peripheral issues like Tom's proposed recreational area and cross-country ski trail on the land circling the plant and, perhaps most tellingly, over his donation to a local farmer of compost created from the excess foliage pulled out of the tanks which he had been composting in bins outside the marsh greenhouse - the argument focusing on Tom's insistence that such by-products were not toxic but were a resource so rich in nutrients that frogs and salamanders chose the bins to live in - and finally, on the single issue of authority itself!
Things had come to a head, and Tom filed a grievance request with the Select Board concerning the Sewer Commissioners' refusal to accept his data and his expertise as the plant's operator. All interested parties who were feeling aggrieved were invited to present their "cases" - mainly Tom himself, and the Commissioners. The Board's ruling was unanimously against the validity of Tom's grounds and in favor of the Sewer Commission's reports of their own grievances toward him! - fairly predictably (objective data from impartial, informed outside observers being both unavailable and unsought-after) over those of the defenders of the plant.
It seems clear, in retrospect, that the battle for a truly fair hearing was lost on the same grounds as Tom's earlier failure to bring the commissioners into his orbit as representative of the plant's capacity to fulfill the needs of the town! His claim and his data were rejected unanimously by the Select Board, as they had been by the commissioners. The hearing focused on credibility and finally, on authority, but its real center was as much the plant itself which was the center of the dispute as it was the persons representing that dispute - either the Sewer Commission or the operator of that plant!
It was now clear that Tom was not willing to accept the appointive authority of the town's sewer commissioners as they saw their role, and they (and now the Select Board) were equally unwilling to accept Tom's word that what he was doing, had done and was proposing to do was or would or could be good for the town of Ashfield!
Worst of all, perhaps, was the divisive effect that the whole solar-aquatic treatment plant was assuming more and more profoundly within the town itself. One of the Select Board began attending Sewer Commissioner meetings at the plant - as did a small group of passionate supporters! Another Select Board member began haranguing anyone who would listen about the evils of deceit being practiced by anyone in any way connected with the plant - including Tom, of course! Tom had no choice, in the end, but to resign his position, as faithfully recorded by the Ashfield News.
As of this writing, the outcome of Ashfield's experiment in new age sewage treatment still hangs in the balance, and its ultimate fate may be a complete re-tooling to convert it back into a conventional plant - but so much money has already been spent with very little result, this issue still hangs in the balance despite the best efforts of the town to resolve it.
One more additional ingredient in this soured misch-masch of circumstances which this writer has just learned (11/25/02) is that the town's original hiring of the engineering firm of Weston and Sampson was done without putting it out to bid! Might not have mattered in the long run, but I expect it is worthy of note en passant.
Click here to read a relatively dispassionate view of the entire history of the plant, and/or here to read a passionate statement by two of its supporters.