Mike Wolanin | The Republic Columbus City Utilities Director Roger Kelso addresses guests during a ribbon cutting ceremony to show off the remodeled and updated area of the Columbus City Utilities building in Columbus, Ind., Thursday, April 20, 2023. Portions of the facility to were recently remodeled and updated. The Security features were added to the main lobby to control access to employee areas. Handicap parking spaces and the sidewalk were updated to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The business office received new furniture and carpet.
Columbus City Utilities has said Ninth Avenue Foods has made significant strides towards complying with the city’s wastewater discharge rules and may achieve full compliance several months ahead of schedule.
The update from the utility comes about three months after officials said the California-based company had been “out of alignment” with its permit and approved a plan to bring the company into compliance by July 2025.
The plan, called a compliance schedule, outlined a series of steps that Ninth Avenue Foods must take to “lessen their impact” on the city’s wastewater treatment plant, city officials said.
“While they’re not in compliance with their permit at 100%, as far as their impact to the utility, it has been significantly lower,” said Columbus City Utilities Director Roger Kelso. “…Their surcharge has gone down like 50%, which is a good gauge.”
“If things kept in the trend that they are now, (Ninth Avenue Foods) will be in compliance well before the July (2025) date,” Kelso added.
Officials have said the compliance issues with Ninth Avenue Foods primarily concern exceeding permissible levels of oil and grease in wastewater, along with high biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), a measure of how much oxygen is needed to remove waste organic matter from water with aerobic bacteria.
Oil and grease can pose problems for the city’s wastewater treatment plant, as they can coat the microorganisms that the city uses to treat wastewater and make them work less efficiently. While the plant has equipment that can deal with excessive levels of oil and grease, it “would cause our plant to be overloaded” should it continue for a long period of time, Kelso said previously.
In the case of Ninth Avenue Foods, the oil and grease come from substances such as dairy fat, officials said. Ninth Avenue Foods specializes in making dairy and dairy alternative products including plant-based milks, such as soy, almond and oat milk.
At one point, the California-based company was using up about half of the city’s entire wastewater treatment capacity and had accumulated nearly $1 million in surcharges over roughly a year, including $166,608 in December. But now the company is using about 10% of the plant’s capacity and has seen its surcharges drop to about $50,000 per month.
Utility officials largely attributed the improvement to new treatment equipment installed at the company’s 220,000-square-foot facility on the south side of Columbus.
According to most recent samples available, Ninth Avenue Foods has been averaging about 100 to 280 milligrams per liter of oil and grease, below the limit of 300 milligrams per liter, officials said.
Additionally, the company’s BOD readings have dropped below average daily limit of 7,000 pounds.
“They’ve improved tremendously,” Angie Bowling, quality control supervisor at Columbus City Utilities. “…We saw (previously) an average pounds per day of BOD from them at 20,000, and now, the most current average of pounds per day is only 5,900.”
“They’re treatment is working well,” Bowling added.
However, Ninth Avenue Foods was still listed in significant non-compliance during the first quarter of this year despite the improvements, as officials are required to take a rolling six-month average of samples, a time frame that still includes readings prior to the improvements, officials said.
Officials said the utility is still working with the company “to get them to 100% compliance” and refine their original compliance schedule to potentially shorten it.
“(It’s) not that we’re gonna slacken it up, it just looks like that we can shorten it,” Kelso said. “…We’re not changing the rules on them (and say), ‘Oh well, that was good enough.’ No, we’re not doing that. But it does appear to be possible (to shorten it) because this first phase has been a learning experience for them as far as will this type of treatment really work. Obviously, from the numbers they’re turning in, it is trending the correct way.”
Ninth Avenue Foods officials have emphasized that the company “is not discharging into rivers, ponds or streams.”
“This discharge is going to the Columbus wastewater treatment facility, as intended, to treat the water,” Joe Lunzer, vice president of property development at Ninth Avenue Foods, said previously. “That said, we are actively meeting with Columbus City Utilities and Columbus city management around the issues and are committed to a positive resolution for all the parties involved.”
In 2021, Ninth Avenue Foods decided to locate its Midwest headquarters Midwest headquarters and production facility in Columbus.
The Columbus City Council voted that same to approve the company’s request for tax abatements on $32 million in real property investment and $70 million in personal property investment for equipment. City officials at the time said at the time that the company’s decision to locate the plant in Columbus was contingent on the approval of these incentives.
In addition, Columbus City Utilities agreed to extend a 12” water main 2,000 feet to serve the facility and future developments along County Road 175W.
The Indiana Economic Development Corp. also offered Ninth Avenue Foods up to $1.1 million in conditional tax credits based on the company’s job creation plans, the IEDC said in a statement in 2021.
In return, the company pledged to invest about $103.5 million to build a dairy and plant-based beverage facility on a 40-acre site located just east of the Woodside Industrial Park, on Columbus’ south side, and employ 101 people by the end of 2024.
This past August, Ninth Avenue Foods told the city that it had recently finished construction on the production facility and was employing 85 people. The company said it expected to be employing 101 people by the end of 2023.
Last year, the city council delayed a vote on an additional tax abatement for the company for an investment in new manufacturing lines, including one processing line and one packaging line, which company officials said at the time would create an additional 10 jobs at the plant.
Then-Columbus Mayor Jim Lienhoop said the vote was delayed after a couple of council members had questions about the wastewater discharge from Ninth Avenue Foods’ plant.
Currently, utilities officials say they still need to wait for more test samples but emphasized that the company is “trending in the right direction.”
“We can’t predict the future, but the trending is in the proper direction right now,” Bowling said.
