New treatment facility on the horizon for Kingston

WALLACE –– Big things are coming for the Kingston-Cataldo Sewer District now that plans are in place for a new treatment facility near Kingston.  

KCSD Manager Jon Groth spoke with the Shoshone County Commissioners a few weeks ago to discuss the progress being made on getting the facility funded, built, and operational.  

According to Groth, KCSD acquired a 130-acre property located between Kelly Gulch and French Gulch that will house the planned facility.  The property was purchased after the district was awarded $6,170,600 to create a new land application treatment plan and lift station last year. 

“The wastewater that’s collected in Cataldo and Kingston, which currently goes to the South Fork Sewer District for treatment, will be collected and treated right there in Kingston,” Groth explained. “The method is going to be to pump everything up to a piece of property the district acquired. Those flows of wastewater will be collected in a pond year-round, treated to where they’re the equivalent of pond water, and then at certain times of the year we’ll use that water to irrigate that property.”  

According to Groth, the annual cost to operate the new treatment system is expected to be less than what the district currently is paying the South Fork Sewer District (SFSD), while also relieving their systems of the approximately 1,000 KCSD customers.  

KCSD has utilized SFSD for wastewater treatment for 45 years, but when upgrades at the SFSD treatment facility forced them to raise their costs by a reported 47% in 2021, KCSD began aggressively seeking out property that could sustain their needs while also being big enough for future expansion.  

The water treated at the SFSD facility is discharged into the nearby Coeur d’Alene River and in 2021, the KCSD Board believed that they could reduce the amount being discharged into the river by 15 million gallons annually if they had their own plant and used the water for irrigation.  

If we’re no longer sending flows to the South Fork Sewer District, that takes pressure off them and they have more capacity for other things,” Groth said. “And with flows being turned into pond water and being irrigated up there then there’s not a drip of those flows winding up in the river.”  

KCSD has worked closely with the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality to make sure that the multi-million-dollar project remains in compliance. Once the designs are completed, the project will be put out for bid.  

Groth expects the designs to be completed later this fall and if they receive a bid they can accept, work will begin in the spring of 2025.  

“It’s finally coming together,” Groth said. “We feel fortunate because there were a lot of steps where we could’ve been derailed, and things have just fallen into place.”