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Citing the ailing condition of the wastewater treatment plant, Manchester City will not accept sewage generated from this year’s Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival.

Water and Sewer Department Director Jeffery Perry made the recommendation at the June 6 meeting of the Water and Sewer Commission.

“We are not accepting flow from Bonnaroo this year, due to the issues that we are having,” he said. “I think it’s in our best interest to send them elsewhere.”

Perry said that a permit was written by the city before he was hired. After further consideration, Water Department officials decided to amend the permit.

According to records cited at the meeting, the city was not paid last year for sewer flow.

“I did find the first permit that (former Water Department Director Phillip Miller) wrote and it had the price on it. The finalized version did not have any price point on it at all. I’m assuming that would be grounds for them not to pay it.”

Perry at the meeting elaborated on the concerns he shared earlier this month at the Board of Mayor and Aldermen meeting earlier this month. He presented the water commission Thursday a list of repairs that he feels is of immediate concern for the continued functioning of the plant.

“A lot of the things that I have issue with … there’s quite a few items on this list, if they go down, the city is in a lot of trouble,” Perry said, warning that the needed repairs would be expensive.

Perry, who was recently hired, observed that most of the issues were the result of a lack of preventative maintenance.

He cautioned that one of the items, one of the two screws in the headworks coming into the plant is down leaving zero redundancy. He said that replacement screw’s pitch and turn were wrong.

Another example involved were sprayers that wash away debris in the system were totally cut out.

The commission largely supported Perry, while voicing concerns about how these were overlooked.

“When something breaks why wasn’t it fixed,” Water Commissioner Gary Hunt asked.

Perry said that he couldn’t answer how things were done before he was hired five weeks ago,

Overall the commission voiced surprise at the situation. Wastewater plant was extensively remodeled just over 10 years ago.

The Perry’s concerns come at a difficult time for the department with it beginning a large sewer system repair to fix chronic manhole overflows.

“The sewer isn’t going to matter if we can’t process it,” Hunt said.

Vice Mayor Mark Messick referring to $6 million in grant money earmarked for sewer repairs stressed that repairs to the plant cannot replace sewer rehab projects.

“You have to do both,” Messick said. “You can’t just do one.”

Perry warned that as the collection system leaks are repaired that is going to add additional flow to the plant.

“It goes down, Perry said. “It’s going to be even a bigger issue. I’m not saying the collection system is not important, but in my mind if (the plant) is not working right…

The Board of Mayor and Aldermen at the June 4 meeting, approved a Water Department budget amendment that pulled approximately $2 million from Water Fund reserves to correct overages, some of which came from the McArthur Street fresh water project.

The Water Department reserves are holding at between $2-4 million. Perry said that many of the projects cannot be handled in house and will need to be bid out. He suggested also while large parts of the plant is not functioning, this would be an appropriate time to rework those system with improvements that would create redundancy or make repairs easier.