Business View Magazine | February 2019

2677 Riverview Road • Akron, OH 44313 • (330) 864 - 2621 • www.kbbioenergy.com 153 moved to the east side of the Portage Path in 1805, and began polluting the water along the Little Cuyahoga River at Case Avenue with their woolen and grist mills. The City’s CSO“Long Term Control Plan,”which was submitted to the federal and state EPAs, and is being managed by the AkronWaterways Renewed! Project Management Team,will improve the sewer system by attempting to achieve zero untreated overflows in a typical year, thereby improving water quality in its streams, canal, and rivers. Some of the money will be spent separating sewer lines from stormwater drains.Where it is more cost-efficient, large basins will be constructed to hold wet weather flows until treatment can take place in an orderly fashion. In late 2014, the City broke ground for the Cas- cade Village Storage Basin, the first in its series of projects that will ultimately become the larg- est single investment–some $1.4 billion- in city infrastructure in Akron’s history. $300 million–the largest single project–will be the construction of the 6,000-foot-long Ohio Canal Interceptor Tunnel. In all, the project includes seven sewer separation projects, two large tunnels, ten storage basins, and improvements to the Water Reclamation Facility. “In implementing this program,we’re picking up the last pieces of these overflows in the combined sewer system,”explains Patrick Gsellman, the Akron Waterways Renewed! ProgramManager,“which is mainly concrete pipes and improvements at the plant; a nuts and bolts kind of program. But, this is where it gets interesting, because a lot of what we looked at while implementing our consent decree was additional green infrastructure beyond just building tanks.There are constructed wetlands and bioswales to control the stormwater at its source.