SANDPOINT — Nearly five months after voters approved a $130 million bond to renovate the city’s wastewater treatment plant, city staff are in discussions with the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality on design and funding. 

Sandpoint’s plant was one of Mayor Jeremy Grimm’s top priorities for 2026 as it continues to age and degrade. He said at a March City Council meeting that the director of DEQ will be in Sandpoint in May and hopes to discuss the rules around wastewater plants to see if the city could utilize an alternative treatment method.  

The city is requesting flexibility in its permits to manage wet-weather high flow events during storms. 

The alternative treatment method would allow the city’s plant to treat the diluted high-flow water with just primary filtration and disinfectant and still meet its federal permit. If allowed, the city could build a significantly smaller plant and save around $10 million in construction, according to city staff.  

“Because it's so diluted, we can simply run it through pre-filtration and then disinfection, and it still meets the requirements for what we put in the river,” Grimm said. “So, if successful and agreeable to the state, this would allow us to downsize the plant design.” 

The city is looking into wet weather treatment because of issues with infiltration and inflow, which is when groundwater or meltwater enter the city’s collection pipes.  

Despite over $10 million worth of investments to limit the I&I problem, Grimm said that on high flow days the city is processing more than triple its usual amount of water, or around 10 million gallons of water. 

"It's a handful of days a year, but it is effectively the maximum flow that our plant would have to be built to accommodate, pushing up towards 10 million gallons a day flow rates of that, which is enormous,” Grimm said. “In August, when it's dry, our flow rates are closer to three million gallons a day on a busy, big day.” 

During the bond campaign, the city repeatedly said that staff would go after low-interest loans and grants to help offset costs, which would be passed through utility rates. In March, the city submitted an application for $60 million in low-interest loans from DEQ, which would help fund the design and first phase of construction.  

While the city has found low-interest loans, these will still raise utility rates for residents in the city. Grimm has long lamented the lack of grant funding from state and federal sources and said that he believes there is a disconnect between the legislature’s priorities and the ones hurting residents. 

"The majority seem to think that low taxes are the pathway to economic success and viable communities, I would argue that the most pressing thing is basic infrastructure,” Grimm said. “Rather than racing to the bottom to have the lowest taxes in the nation, they should prepare their communities with infrastructure so the private sector can grow." 

The ageing plant committed six discharge violations in 2024, according to an annual report by the Idaho Conservation League. While the plant did not exceed its load over limit, a breezeway failure triggered an audit by DEQ, which resulted in a $3,450 fine for the violations found in July 2024.   

Grimm said the city’s next steps are dependent on the meeting with DEQ’s director and that the decision will determine which path the engineering and phase one will take. 

“If we are unsuccessful in showing that this wet weather treatment can protect the environment and allow for a smaller plant design, then we will proceed with the traditional plant design,” Grimm said. "This is really the moment that we've been working for the past year to try to get this data to prove that wet weather treatment can meet and protect the environment and meet the standards of our permit.” 

Grimm said earlier this year that he didn’t expect to see any earth moving until 2027 and confirmed that timeline in April.