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Newtown Bucks County Joint Municipal Authority

15 South Congress Street, Newtown PA 18940
PO Box 329, Newtown PA 18940

STATEMENT ON WASTEWATER TREATMENT PLANT ,
March 17, 2025

The Newtown, Bucks County Joint Municipal Authority (Authority) has decided to halt all work on the proposed wastewater treatment facility.

The Authority had been actively pursuing construction of a brand-new state-of-the-art wastewater treatment facility on a 17.5-acre parcel between the Newtown Bypass and Lower Silver Lake Road.

Gaining control of spiraling sewer rate hikes was the impetus for the Authority’s pursuit of this project.
After much research, the Authority board and its professionals envisioned construction of a new plant as the best means to prevent spiraling rate hikes levied by the Bucks County Water and Sewer Authority and the Philadelphia Water Department. As a customer of these entities, the Authority has no say about how often or how steep rate increases will be and therefore is forced to pass along higher rates to the Authority’s 9,000 customers.

However, the Authority, during its Tuesday, March 11 board meeting, voted to stop all work on the proposed project. The vote came on the heels of opposition from community members, as well as the Newtown Township Board of Supervisors.

At this juncture, the Authority has no plans to advance this project. In the interim, the Authority retains ownership of the land where the plant had been proposed and will keep the public apprised of any next steps or updates in that regard as they become available.

The Authority thanks the public, as well as our customers, for their interest and feedback as it relates to this project.

We take due diligence seriously. Our customers and communities demand no less.
As a public authority under the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, we are committed to providing the resident and business ratepayers of Newtown Borough and Township with the most cost-effective and safest solutions for wastewater treatment services, mindful of the increasing needs of our community as well as the more demanding legal framework in which we operate.
Based on the information we know from Bucks County Water and Sewer Authority, with which we are a customer and with Philadelphia Water Department (the treatment facility currently used for all waste generated by BCWSA’s Bucks County Regional System, including this Authority), significant rate hikes are likely forthcoming from both entities that would adversely impact the Authority and its ratepayers.

We decided that it was important to understand all our options going forward to protect our customers from the long-term impact of rate inflation beyond our control. We asked our engineers to look into the feasibility of constructing our own local wastewater treatment facilities to determine if that would enable us to better control costs, better maintain the system, and provide state-of-the-art technology for the future, when more stringent standards would be mandated to protect the environment.

Toward that end, we retained expert assistance from wastewater management experts, financial consultants, and have undertaken initial studies in these areas to determine whether it would be the right decision to move forward on such a plan. By this we mean, would it be both economically and environmentally sound to decide to build such a plant?

We do not have all those studies/reports complete and it will be months before we do, likely toward the end of 2025. We will make those documents public once we have analyzed them.

For further information on the Authority, and this project, please visit www.nbcjma.org

OUR MISSION IS YOUR SERVICE

Our goal is to provide reliable and safe sanitary sewer services to residential, commercial, and industrial customers within Newtown Pennsylvania all while doing so in an efficient and cost-effective manner to maintain reasonable rates while continually planning, maintaining, and upgrading our facilities to meet all current and future needs.

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(+021) 157 489

E-BILLING SIGNUP & ONLINE PAYMENTS NOW AVAILABLE

Would you prefer to receive your quarterly sewer invoices via email instead of a paper bill? Avoid the risk of your bill getting lost in the mail by signing up for e-billing! Call us today at (215) 968-4109 to find out how.

*Please note that only the property owner of record can opt for e-billing; we do not invoice tenants directly.
For your convenience, we also now offer online payments of Sewer Invoices. You can easily pay using just your account number and street address.