A long-term project with a hefty price tag in western Massachusetts is getting a boost in funding. As WAMC reports, it’s part of a greater effort to protect and restore aquatic life up and down the Connecticut River and as far as the Long Island Sound.
The City of Chicopee is once again receiving aid to help upgrade its wastewater treatment capabilities – upgrades that would mean not just Environmental Protection Agency compliance, but healthier watersheds.
“It’s important to remember… a hundred years ago, this was the most prosperous part of America - Chicopee, Holyoke, Springfield to Hartford, but the river paid a price,” Neal said during a press conference at City Hall Wednesday, detailing the new funding.
In its manufacturing heyday, cities in the Pioneer Valley were pumping out products, but also byproducts that often ended up in the biggest river in the region. Over a century later, the mills are mostly gone, but much of the old water and sewer infrastructure remains.
That includes parts of Chicopee, which has been making headway on matters like reducing combined sewer overflow discharge that goes into the Connecticut River – discharge levels that were the subject of a 2006 consent decree.
Then there’s the matter of nitrogen. Modern EPA standards have been curtailing how much of it ends up in local waterways, imposing limits that cities like Chicopee are trying to comply with.
“This is not just the city - it's all neighboring communities along the Connecticut and Chicopee Rivers,” explains Elizabette Batista, the city’s DPW Superintendent. “This is because there's struggles with aquatic life in our southern neighbor, Long Island Sound, so they've been really fighting for improvement in the discharges from treatment plants along the Connecticut River, [a] tributary to the Long Island Sound - in hopes that it'll improve their aquatic life.”
The nitrogen in question originates from wastewater that, in excess, disturbs microscopic life that, in turn, threatens fish and crustaceans. Solving that is core to the Long Island Sound Study, a federal-state partnership established in 1985 to support projects like Chicopee’s effort to improve its aging wastewater treatment plant – a facility that dates back to the 1950s.
“Traditionally … nitrogen removal happens with detention time. The water sits – the biology works in removing that nitrogen, and then you can achieve those [EPA] limits, but we don't have that luxury,” Batista explains. “In order to achieve that, we need to do a significant expansion of our treatment plant.”
Officials say the expansion is a costly one. Funding’s already been secured for one of the first phases, estimated to cost $12 million as it begins this year. At least $10 million has come via the EPA and congressional earmarks – the city is borrowing the rest.
Secured, in part, by Neal, the new $1.1 million announced Wednesday is available via the “Massachusetts Clean Water State Revolving Fund.” According to the city, the dollars are going toward the next phase – the “primary nitrogen reduction component of the project,” building on the first phase’s upgrades to biological reactors, liquid treatment system improvements and more.
In 2022, officials estimated Chicopee was the state’s second-largest producer of nitrogen that discharges into the Long Island Sound’s watershed.
That same year, the Springfield Republican reported Chicopee was releasing about 1,800 pounds of nitrogen a day into the Connecticut River, triple what discharge permits at the time were calling for – just shy of 650 pounds.
An initial estimate from the Long Island Sound Study four years pegged major plant upgrades as costing at least $40 million, with a completion date of 2030. Officials believes the upgrades will reduce the city’s nitrogen discharges by as much as 100,000 pounds annually.
It’s all something Chicopee Mayor John Vieau tells WAMC the city is taking seriously, much like its CSO reduction and separation efforts – a problem that’s technically been centuries in the making, he argues.
“The real issue is when it rains, when you have a combined system like we have, which dates back to before we [became a city] … prior to 1848, probably the 1700s, when they decided we're going to build one pipe for each house and send it right in the river,” he said Wednesday. “Then in the 50s, they put in a plant, and this plant was, at that time, probably state-of-the-art and could handle the capacity, but what's happened now is with modern rules and laws, we are not in compliance for nitrogen removal.”
“… and the sewer separation work that's been done: we're in over close to … [approximately] $270 million,” he continued.
According to the Connecticut Mirror last year, Chicopee Water Pollution Control project supervisor Quinn Lonczak said at least 80 percent of the city’s "average annual discharge has been eliminated" and that over 60 percent of its "long-term CSO control plan projects" have reached completion as of 2025.
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This story originally aired on Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026.
