Bellevue has matters well in hand when it comes to meeting wet weather mandates, according to the director of the 3 Rivers Wet Weather Project.

The 83 municipalities of Southwestern Pennsylvania serviced by ALCOSAN have spent the last several years and millions of dollars in an effort to meet the mandates of an administrative consent order (ACO) handed down by a federal court. At issue is the longtime violation of state and federal environmental protection laws by the local governments and ALCOSAN that has resulted in raw sewage being released into area rivers and other waterways in times of wet weather, when rain and ground water overwhelms the sanitary sewer system.

The first point of attack was the elimination of storm and ground water from the sanitary sewer pipes. To that end, most municipalities have required the disconnection of residential and commercial building downspouts, and have slowly inspected and repaired their sanitary systems to address areas where ground water may be entering the sewers.

Bellevue has just completed its fifth and final initial phase of sewer line point repairs at a cost of about $160,000, according to the borough engineer.

The next steps, according to 3RWW director John Schombert, are to determine if the point repairs and disconnections have been successful in eliminating enough water from the sanitary sewers, and to come up with a plan to maintain the sanitary lines in the future.

Bellevue is among the lucky communities, Schombert said, who have limited connections to ALCOSAN and lie along the river closest to the facility.

“It’s not very complex,” Schombert said of Bellevue’s six points of connection.

Other communities, he said, are being forced to invest millions of dollars in “gray infrastructure,” i.e., holding tanks and other facilities designed to keep storm water from entering the sanitary sewers until the system can handle it.

Those major interceptors should probably be televised every two or three years, he said, otherwise reinspection on the remainder of Bellevue’s sewers can be scheduled once every 10 years to identify potential problem areas.

In response to a question by council president Kathy Coder vat Tuesday’s council meeting, Schombert said that sewage charges in the affected communities are “all over the place.” Many communities have not charged enough to fund the level of ser-vice they must provide, he said, but because Bellevue is looking at sewer maintenance, and not the investment in gray infrastructure, the borough will not need the large amounts of money other municipalities will have to find.

Schombert said that the DEP will be conducting an audit of municipalities in the coming years. The state agency will be looking at whether each municipality has developed a plan to eliminate sewer overflow, and whether each is able to fund that plan, he said, with implementation of the individual plans required between 2015 and 2026. Because Bellevue is one of the first communities in the sewage chain that leads to ALCOSAN, the borough may be required to begin implementation in the first part of that period, according to Schombert.