The plan for the expansive River Pointe Commerce Park in Upper Mount Bethel Township includes its own sewage treatment plant and water tower.
Who will run that system on the proposed 804-acre industrial park just south of Portland was a point of discussion for the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission’s Comprehensive Planning Committee during its monthly virtual meeting Tuesday.
“Well, ultimately, if you put in a public or a private wastewater treatment center there for that property, who would manage that wastewater?” asked committee member Tara Zrinski, a Northampton County commissioner. “And do (the developers) have somebody to do that right now?”
Fred Ebert, an engineer representing Bethlehem developer Lou Pektor, said it hasn’t been predetermined that the plant will be private.
“That’s part of sewage facilities planning,” he said. “We are going down all options. It initially started with the local borough authority. We are exploring a new municipal authority that will own and operate it.”
River Pointe is expected to include 12 buildings totaling 5.8 million square feet on about 804 acres. Pektor bought 725 acres in 2019 for $17 million for the project initially known as River Pointe Logistics, along River and Demi roads, about 1½ miles from Interstate 80.
Ebert said that among the options are to hire its own employees, to use a contract operator as Portland Borough does, or use a private utility enterprise.
“The other thing here that’s important is that we’re looking at land application for our project and not discharging it into the Delaware River, and that’s a very important distinction,” Ebert said. “That’s why the treatment plant will be up here.”
Ebert said the plant will process about 200,000 gallons of wastewater per day. By comparison, Portland’s plant processes 105,000 gallons, he said.
When asked by Zrinski about sludge, a controversial subject in the Slate Belt, Ebert said it would be transported to a larger treatment plant for disposal.
In a draft of a letter to the Upper Mount Bethel Planning Commission, LVPC Senior Community Planner Jillian Seitz recommended the complex use a municipal-owned system, as privately owned ones are “often neglected due to the high long-term costs of maintenance.” The LVPC said Upper Mount Bethel and Portland should work with the developer to study the concept of using public sewer service.
The letter has not yet been sent to the developer and will have to be approved by the LVPC board, likely at a meeting on Thursday.
Pektor said there have been “cursory discussions to date” with Portland.
“In between, we have gone ahead to design our own plan with their own capability,” Pektor said, “with discussions to form an authority if that plan happens to be on the fence. That’s the current plan. Then, we would have to look at what the ultimate titleholder looks like that we’re going through design first and feasibility first and determine how it plays out.”
In its letter, the LVPC said it estimates 15,475 passenger car trips and 3,015 truck trips in a typical weekday from River Pointe.
Charlie Cole, a member of Concerned Citizens of Upper Mount Bethel, which has been fighting the development, said there has been an increase in truck traffic in the area since an interchange with Route 33 at the Chrin Commerce Centre in Palmer Township was built.
“When you have a traffic impact of 18,000 vehicles per day,” he said, “that works out to something like 13 per minute. The Chrin interchange was slipped in and now the municipalities that are in between Chrin and Interstate 80 face the impact of all this truck traffic coming across Route 611. The same thing is going to happen to Route 512 in areas and the impact studies and any plans to deal with it are totally inadequate at this time.”
Morning Call reporter Evan Jones can be reached at ejones@mcall.com.