Ongoing work on Innsbrook Resort’s sewage treatment facility again came up at the Thursday, Aug. 20, Village of Innsbrook Board of Trustees meeting, where Board Chairman Michael Caton provided an update on progress on the project.

“So they have this, what they call an oxidation ditch or they call an oxidation tank, that’s been installed. Evidently there’s brushes that go into it. The brushes are actually on-site, but they’re waiting for a part before they can install them, and they are aware that, obviously, once they finish construction, they know they have to fence the rest of the property in,” Caton said.

“So those are the latest things I know about the treatment facility. The only other thing I know is, I think, from looking at a couple of the permits, I think the current capacity of the existing system is 68,000 gallons per day. The new facility will handle 150,000 gallons per day.”

Caton also said he and Trustee Virgal Woolfolk recently met with Innsbrook Resort Chairman & CEO Charlie Boyce about the resort’s trash area off of Highway F.

“We probably need to follow up with them,” Caton said. “We talked about screaming and noise. We also talked about maybe they can turn it off so that — at certain hours, they can turn the compactors off so there isn’t noise in the evening, so there’s some follow-up planning we need to do.”

Woolfolk, who has previously criticized management of the Innsbrook Resort sewage treatment facility project, suggested at the Aug. 20 meeting that the Village of Innsbrook adopt an “environmental checklist” for future projects.

“I wanted to initiate something at the next planning meeting, and then get approval through the board, to do what we call an environmental checklist. And this checklist will be filled out whenever they do a plat or they have any type of development here, and it fills out what impacts it would have on the community, whether that be environmental, traffic, air, whatever, but it breaks it down, and then the public gets to comment on that,” Woolfolk said. 

“But it gets away from this, just, you know, ‘We’re gonna do this,’ and then we have no paperwork and no paper trail. So I was going to get a proposal together to show like a template and kind of duplicate it, so, it’s what we use out in other places, and that way we have a record of what the potential impacts are going to be, so that kind of solves that issue,” he added.

Speaking in public comment at the meeting, resident Les Kauble also discussed the Innsbrook Resort facility.

“On the sewage treatment facility, I want to make sure that you’re aware here, as the board members, that this municipality, the governing body, that you’re continuously updated when there’s expansions of a facility, which in my recollection has never even asked for a permit for expansions thereof, and I know of two times it’s been done,” he said.

Kauble additionally submitted a list of concerns relating to the project, ranging from environmental issues, to whether the new facility will have enough capacity, to emergency contingency plans in case of natural disasters.