From the Arkansas Advocate:
The Arkansas Department of Corrections has made little discernible progress in fixing an aging wastewater plant that regularly violates its federal water permit, public records show.
The department missed a 2024 deadline for completing repairs to the Cummins-Varner Wastewater Treatment Plant and returning the facility to compliance with its wastewater permit. Despite an extension of the deadline to 2027, the corrections department has yet to move beyond the early planning stages on an expansion of the plant’s capacity.
The wastewater plant serves two of the state’s largest prisons and has been under a consent administrative order from the state’s environmental agency since 2022. Consent administrative orders (CAOs) are legally binding, voluntary agreements between the Arkansas Division of Environmental Quality and those who have violated or are believed to have violated state or federal environmental regulations. The orders outline steps to return to compliance and monetary penalties, and violators do not have to admit fault by signing one.
While DEQ technically levied an $8,400 penalty against DOC for the violations in 2021, the corrections department will only have to pay it if DEQ determines it isn’t in compliance with the consent order.
The plant treats waste from the Cummins and Varner Units in Lincoln County and is at least 50 years old, according to a report filed with DEQ in 2021. It hasn’t had any significant upgrades since 2001, the corrections department said last year.
The plant is designed to treat 800,000 gallons of wastewater per day, but public records show that for over a decade it’s been exceeding that amount. In 2021, amid 12 months of pollution violations, an analysis by DOC contractor McClellan Engineering Consultants concluded the plant had “significantly exceeded” its treatment capacity, with an average of 1.2 million gallons of waste passing through the plant every day.
The excess flow contributed to the plant discharging wastewater that hadn’t been fully treated and exceeded permit limits.
Despite the 2024 compliance deadline, the corrections department spent years deciding whether to build a new, larger plant or expand the existing one. It asked the Division of Environmental Quality for a deadline extension, citing a search for funding, even as it hadn’t settled on a course of action.
It’s unclear if the delay has harmed the environment.
“Permit limits are developed to be protective of aquatic life, water quality, and human health,” DEQ spokesperson Melony Martinez said in an email. “Violations of the permitted limits over a period of time may contribute to an impairment of the receiving waterbody or downstream waterbody.”
The Advocate’s analysis of the plant’s permit violations is based on a review of public records and discharge data reported to the Division of Environmental Quality.
Despite multiple requests, a Department of Corrections spokesperson did not provide answers to questions about the agency’s plans to address the permit violations at the plant or when the fixes would be funded. Instead, the spokesperson provided a written statement from Corrections Secretary Lindsay Wallace.
“The Cummins/Varner Wastewater Treatment Plan expansion continues to be a priority for the Board of Corrections and the Department of Corrections as it strives to ensure both compliance and production from the facility,” Wallace said in the statement. “The complexity of the project and changes in [construction] contingencies have required re-evaluation from different administrations, Corrections Secretaries and Maintenance Directors to ensure the scope of the project and the solutions are adequate for the changing needs of the units.”
The Cummins and Varner Units hold just over 4,000 incarcerated people.
Timeline
- Pre-2013: Cummins WWTP begins receiving more waste than it was designed to treat, according to McClellan engineers
- 2017-2019: The Cummins WWTP begins seeing more limit exceedances during this period.
- 2019: DOC tells DEQ that multiple components of the Cummin WWTP’s treatment process had failed “within a four month period,” but that the plant was undergoing rehabilitation.
- 2021: The Cummins WWTP breaches its permit limits 106 times. DOC submits compliance plan to DEQ saying it plans to construct a new, 3.25 MGD treatment plant to replace the existing plant.
- 2022: DEQ and DOC enter into the original consent order.
- 2023: The number of permit limit exceedances drop to the lowest point since 2018. DOC asks for an extension of the consent order’s compliance deadline.
- 2024: It receives a deadline extension from DEQ to 2027. Meanwhile, the plant’s condition continues to deteriorate.
- 2025: DOC pivots to building an expansion of the existing WWTP, a cheaper option. Meanwhile, the plant breached its permit limits more times between January and August than it did the entirety of 2024.
Blown deadlines
Tim LaPara, a professor of civil, environmental and geo-engineering at the University of Minnesota who researches wastewater treatment, said wastewater plants have a lifespan of 10 to 25 years before they need to be replaced or upgraded.
In 2021, the Cummins plant exceeded permit limits 106 times — though the severity ranged wildly — mostly due to equipment breakdowns. In April 2021, it discharged partially-treated waste containing average fecal coliform concentrations (an indicator for potentially harmful E. coli bacteria) over 20 times higher than permitted.
A visit by McClellan’s engineers in August 2021 found much of the plant deteriorated or nonfunctional.
“They had a whole bunch of problems in 2021,” said Ellen Carpenter, a former DEQ water division chief and environmental lawyer who reviewed the plant’s discharge data and other documentation at the Advocate’s request.
In 2021, the DOC’s engineering consultant initially said the department would construct a 3.25 MGD replacement plant to permanently fix the issues by the 2024 deadline. But the deadline grew closer, then passed, with little reported progress as the department explored other options for remedying the plant violations. In August last year, DEQ extended the compliance deadline to the end of 2027.
But the corrections department’s most recent progress report indicated it won’t be in compliance until 2028. Other documents obtained from the DOC put the projected compliance date as late as mid-2030 — three years after the revised compliance deadline and six past the original.
Meanwhile, the department is already missing milestones outlined in a revised compliance plan created after the deadline extension. The design should have been finished in May, but it still hasn’t been completed, based on quarterly progress reports the DOC provides the environmental agency.
The corrections department said last year it could not obtain funds for the project until its design was complete, and DOC documents indicate it must begin obtaining money for the project by May 2026 to be in compliance by 2030.
The Legislature’s fiscal session, where budget decisions for state agencies are made, begins in April.
With the design deadline missed, the department probably won’t meet the 2027 deadline, said Carpenter, the former DEQ water quality supervisor.
“They’re already putting the [division] on notice that they aren’t going to meet that deadline” through the progress reports, Carpenter said.
DEQ’s Martinez told the Advocate that extending the consent order again may be necessary if the revised deadline can’t be met, but did not say whether that was likely.
Options considered by DOC
Based on the records it was provided, the Advocate identified five options that the Department of Corrections considered to address the Cummins plant’s permit violations. It is not known if other alternatives not listed here were considered.
- New, 3.25 MGD treatment plant. Cost: $26 million.
- New, 2 MGD plant plus upgrading existing 0.8 plant. Cost: $31.8 million.
- Upgrade and expand the existing plant to 2 MGD. Quoted costs have varied from $9.5 million to $20.6 million.
- Reduce the amount of wastewater entering the plant through a water conservation project at the Cummins and Varner Units. Cost: $10.6 million.
- Do nothing and pay for whatever fines or legal actions DEQ or the EPA levies.
Fast flow, slow solutions
Despite delays to the permanent fix for Cummins’ treatment troubles, the corrections department has taken some action. Equipment repairs in 2022 coincided with fewer pollution limit violations. DOC’s plans for a secondary waste disinfection method will likely help prevent violations as well, Carpenter said.
But the plant struggled to comply with its permit in 2024 and 2025 as the half-century-old facility continued to deteriorate despite the improvements, department documents and discharge data show.
The plant’s capacity is a major contributor to its ongoing treatment problems.
When the plant is overburdened, waste can move too quickly through the system to be fully treated, LaPara said. This is especially true if the flow of waste remains significantly above capacity for long periods, which is known to happen at Cummins.
Three years after submitting its initial compliance plan to environmental regulators, the corrections department changed its mind about building a new, larger plant, opting instead to expand the existing plant’s capacity to 2 million gallons per day (MGD) — much less than either of the new plant options the agency considered.
McClellan engineers said the expansion would be more than adequate, writing last year that the it “is the preferred alternative that will meet the overall goals that include increased treatment capacity, reliable permit compliance, and cost effectiveness.”
But a corrections department employee expressed concern in written notes dated Sept. 12, 2024, weeks after the consent order deadline was extended.
The plant “needs to handle more than 2 MGD,” Jim Flannery, the DOC’s water and wastewater coordinator wrote in the notes, which were emailed to other department officials after he reviewed a preliminary engineering report McClellan sent earlier that month.
“What worries me about this is I only see an increase in flow design to 2.0 MGD when we are not positive that the plant flow only reaches 2.0 MGD,” Flannery wrote.
The meter that measures how much waste runs through the Cummins plant maxes out at 2 MGD, according to Flannery’s notes, leaving it unclear how much waste passes through the plant when the flow exceeds that volume.
Other records show the plant’s flow meter has maxed out for 12 to 18 hours at a time, causing “lots of problems” for plant treatment equipment.
Having an accurate picture of how much waste goes through a plant is necessary to inform decisions about capacity expansion, said LaPara, the Minnesota engineering professor. Given the flow meter’s limitations, LaPara said the expansion’s lower capacity was “troubling,” barring “some rationale” to explain the decision.
“If they’re designing for a certain capacity and they actually need more than that, the new facility won’t work,” LaPara said.
He stressed, however, that other factors of the plant’s design would also influence treatment performance, and that he could not predict what the exact consequences of the lower capacity would be.
Increasing costs
Cost estimates have gone up since the Department of Corrections settled on expanding the current plant.
Drafts and final versions of the 2024 preliminary engineering report indicate the plant expansion would cost either $9.5 million or $12.3 million. But documents from 2025 indicate costs now range from $16.8 million to $20.6 million — not accounting for tariffs.
The Advocate requested clarification from the department regarding which estimate for the expansion was the most accurate, but did not receive an answer.
In an April 2, 2025, email to McClelland staff, DOC’s Flannery said he was “quite sure” the price tag for the upgrades “will have to be revisited.”
Adam Triche, a professional engineer with McClellan, asked if Flannery wanted to adjust short-term cost projections contained in the department’s 20-year wastewater spending plan, then pegged at $16.8 million. Flannery responded that planning ahead would be “smart thinking.” Explanations would be demanded if they had to increase the price later down the line, he said.
“I expect RPGs to be launched (questions) from every direction on why,” Flannery wrote.
