FALL RIVER — The city could be pushing for greater “regionalization” when it comes to sharing the maintenance, operations and associated costs of utilities — in particular, wastewater treatment.
Already, Fall River’s wastewater management network includes inter-municipality agreements with Freetown, Westport, and Tiverton, Rhode Island, in a move that has consolidated utility services by means in some cases of supplying satellite municipalities with water and accepting their wastewater, helping to relieve the burden of utility costs on the city’s taxpayers when it comes time to pay for services.
Fall River hasn’t serviced Somerset’s water since the 80’s, though a pipe was placed under the Taunton River that connects the city to the town in the 70’s.
Now, Paul Ferland, the city’s administrator of community utilities, is keen to act on the recommendations of a 2019 regionalization study paid for with a state Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness program grant.
Allowing Fall River to connect to smaller towns, he said at the Sept. 9 City Council Committee on Finance meeting, such as Somerset, Swansea and Dighton, either on a regular or emergency basis would help aggregate costs and benefit all involved.
Specifically, Fall River has entered talks with Somerset at a time when the town is faced with a looming question of whether to remain “a silo” and invest in updating their own wastewater treatment facilities, or regionalize. “We really need to sit down at the table and figure out how we want to move forward,” Ferland told councilors.
“We’ve got a problem here,” said Steven Nasiff, a Berkley resident whose family-run Nasiff Fruit Company is anchored in the city. Nasiff’s remarks during public input were in favor of the prospect of “regionalizing” community utilities.
Nasiff said he and Ferland held a meeting the night before in Somerset to “get some movement going” on what he says he is a “100-plus-million-dollar problem” in Somerset, compared to Fall River’s “200-hundred-million-dollar problem,” when it comes to sharing utilities costs.
“There’s heavy lifting to be done… This problem will be affecting the city and the region for the next 80 years,” Nasiff estimated. “We need some awareness,” he said, “But it’s going to happen.”
Why Somerset?
Somerset began evaluating their water pumping facilities for major upgrades in 2018.
In January 2024, Somerset released a plan that included a drafted permit in respect to permissible nitrogen levels in its wastewater entering its treatment plants.
But in that initial report were “bad assumptions,” Ferland said, about Fall River taking over Somerset’s wastewater and supply water that they are in surplus of anyway, said Ferland, since the Brayton Point Power Plant closed in 2010.
By August 2025, a new drafted plan prepared by Providence-based environmental engineering firm Wright-Pierce was released that identified Fall River as a local municipality with which to share the cost of public utilities.
But first, a deal must be structured before either city or town can reap economic or environmental benefits in store.
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What’s in the August 2025 plan?
Somerset’s second draft of a plan to regionalize community utilities recognizes Fall River as “the primary option” for the town’s Water Pollution Control Facility, which requires an upgrade estimated to cost $57.5 million based on the 2018 report.
In 2021, Wright-Pierce conducted a value engineering study that figured an upgrade to Somerset’s facilities, which are managed by the town’s Water and Sewer Commission, would reduce solid waste costs by $7.5 million.
While Somerset is 95% sewered, “many” of the town’s pump stations have not been upgraded in the last 10 to 30 years.
Somerset’s current permit that limits the volume of flow pumped through stations and discharged into the Taunton River would likely need to be abandoned if the town regionalized with Fall River. In turn, Somerset would likely become a co-permittee on Fall River’s permit, at time when permitting is difficult to obtain by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
According to the report, Fall River is “the closest” wastewater system “with capacity” to accept Somerset’s wastewater.
The city has 15 pump stations and 200 miles of sewers, some of which date back to the mid-1800s.
The report states there is no Combined Sewer Overflow tunnel between Somerset and Fall River, but one option involves installing a new pump station in Somerset midway between the Braga Bridge and the Veterans Memorial Bridge to transport wastewater to Fall River’s Central Street pump station under the Taunton River via the horizontal directional drilling of a pipeline.
A rendering of one construction option in an August 2025 draft prepared by engineering firm Wright-Pierce that will guide Somerset’s planning if the town decides to split utility costs with Fall River.
Other diagrams depict wastewater collection at Fall River’s Columbia Street drop shaft, or a third option that involves underwater boring under the Braga that could send Somerset’s wastewater directly to Fall River’s wastewater treatment plant on Bay Street.
If Somerset chooses to upgrade its wastewater system, projected costs of a single-phase upgrade project today rise to $75 million.
A rendering of one construction option in an August 2025 draft prepared by engineering firm Wright-Pierce that will guide Somerset’s planning if the town decides to split utility costs with Fall River.
But if the town chooses one of the regionalization options with the city, it will spend between $72.6 million and $112 million and be tethered to costlier annual outcomes over a 20-year period, due to what the report terms “Fall River’s user charge rate.”
Construction is not projected to occur for another 10 years if regionalization is agreed to.
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Fall River treats 22 million gallons of wastewater daily
Fall River serves 22,000 customers in its district, Ferland said. Taking on Somerset would add approximately 7,000 more customers. The city treats 22 million gallons of wastewater a day, with a permitting capacity of 30.9.
If Dighton, Somerset and Swansea join the city’s regionalization network, Ferland said 4.2 million gallons per day would be added to Fall River’s typical treatment volume.
A regionalization agreement would push discharge up to the Mount Hope Bay, preserving environmental interests in the Taunton River, Ferland said.
As chemical treatments become costlier, capturing the rates from other communities can help spread out utility expenses.
Fall River’s Regional Wastewater Treatment Facility, located on Bay Street, is seen here on Sept. 25, 2025.
City Councilor Paul B. Hart, who originally submitted a resolution that brought this issue before the Council, suggested that bigger companies who handled wastewater have left the city and don’t offset rates any longer.
A plan for consolidation “would help the residents,” he said at the meeting. “There’s no doubt about it.”
With Somerset eyeing Swansea’s wastewater in line with its multi-phase sewer infrastructure project along Routes 6 and 118, a decision regarding what to do about wastewater could be coming down in the next five or six years.
Regionalization isn’t a new thing, Ferland said, naming the Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Plant that receives wastewater from 43 greater Boston communities, and Springfield, Massachusetts’s treatment plant that services 37,200 accounts, as having significant wastewater collection networks geared toward net cost savings.
This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Fall River pushes for greater regionalization of wastewater services