DEERFIELD — With the town continuing to explore options to repair or replace the Old Deerfield Wastewater Treatment Plant, the Selectboard/Sewer Commissioners will take a step back to see if a phased repair plan might be the most sensible choice.

The Selectboard met with Dave Prickett, of sewer consultant DPC Engineering, last week to lay out a conceptual phased approach to the approximately half-century-old building on Little Meadow Road that would start with redoing the electrical infrastructure.

Town officials had been working with the nonprofits in Old Deerfield — led by Deerfield Academy — over the last several years to collaborate on a solution to the aging plant’s issues, but those efforts have slowed down since early 2024, when the town and nonprofits presented two different operation systems for the plant.

“Basically, we’ve been around and around this plant for a while and we have had numerous scenarios that have all cost a lot of money,” Selectboard Chair Tim Hilchey said. “Now, we’re back to the idea of trying to do this in a step-wise fashion, and does that make sense to fix one portion and leapfrog to the next portion.”

Laying out the context of the town’s sewer system, Prickett said the original goal of the nearly complete South Deerfield Wastewater Treatment Plant’s construction was to have the Old Deerfield facility pump to the new one.

While that vision never came to fruition, he said the South Deerfield plant’s upgrades are “robust” and will see the plant set to operate efficiently and safely for years to come. With the South Deerfield project costing tens of millions of dollars, and estimates for the Old Deerfield plant hovering around $16 million to $17 million, Prickett said it might make more financial sense to take on repairs and upgrades instead.

“In light of everything that’s happened, with the craziness of construction costs, the challenges with getting funding, everything that’s already on the ratepayers for debt service, etc., we were asked to look at a different set of goalposts for Old Deerfield,” Prickett explained. “Rather than focus on robust, long, long-term, the lens is more on fixing old equipment within the squares, rectangles and circles that exist over there now.”

The town’s wastewater treatment crew, led by Chief Wastewater Operator Eric Meals, have been effective in patching repairs and coming up with creative solutions to fix the plant’s maladies, but they are reaching the limit of what is possible due to the facility’s age, according to Prickett. He said “there’s not a lot of things you can buy for something built in the ’70s.”

Selectboard member Trevor McDaniel, who typically serves as the board’s lead on all things sewer, agreed and underscored that while staff members have been effective, there is always the possibility the plant breaks down, which would cause a lot of trouble for the town.

“At some point, and it could happen tomorrow, it could happen three weeks from now or a year from now, the electrical will go and you just can’t get parts for that stuff anymore. It’s too old,” McDaniel said. “We’ve been robbing Peter and Paul and stealing parts.

“If it goes down, we’re kind of in trouble,” he continued. “The thought was, instead of tackling a large project all at once, was to tackle the electrical first.”

As plans move forward, Hilchey said he’d like to try to figure out a financial solution that doesn’t burden ratepayers. The Old Deerfield plant primarily serves the nonprofits in town — Deerfield Academy, Historic Deerfield, The Bement School, etc. — and fewer than 30 houses.

Hilchey said he’d like to “pursue a negotiated agreement” with some of the schools to help pay for repairs. The nonprofits have helped in the past, including as recently as summer 2024, with Deerfield Academy paying construction costs for two projects related to the Old Deerfield plant.

“We’re allowed betterment charges for infrastructure for specific users. We’ve taken away the requirement for the town’s taxpayers to contribute anything to this,” Hilchey said, referring to amended sewer bylaws approved at a 2022 Special Town Meeting. “We’d want to use whatever legal authority we have to minimize the impact on the ratepayers.”

With last week’s discussion focusing on conceptual plans, McDaniel said the board and DPC Engineering can continue to flesh out their plans and determine preliminary cost estimates before bringing the project forward to community partners.

“Once we have a plan laid out, a schedule laid out, rough figures laid out, we could then talk with all the partners involved in town,” he said. “If we come to them with a full plan … they want to help.”

Chris Larabee can be reached at clarabee@recorder.com.