Fort Smith issues 2025 consent decree report, notes ‘substantial improvements’

While highly technical, the city of Fort Smith recently provided state and federal officials a required consent decree report for 2025. The 123-page outlines compliance actions taken, infrastructure work, and other aspects of mandated work to significantly revamp the city’s sewer system.

After decades of failing to adequately maintain the city sewer system, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Justice executed a consent decree in 2014 with the city that required improvements to the city’s sewer system. The consent decree also followed a 1982 administrative order with which the city did not fully comply.

The Fort Smith Board of Directors on March 3 approved a modification of the consent decree. Paul Calamita, an attorney with Richmond, Va.-based AquaLaw, said the modification provides “a fresh start, a complete reset,” that will give the city the time and flexibility to meet consent decree requirements. Key provisions that benefit the city, according to Calamita, include an 11.5-year extension of the original 15-year deadline that is set to expire Jan. 1, 2027. The proposed plan moves the compliance deadline to June 30, 2038.

“The city spent much of 2025 working with both the State of Arkansas and U.S. EPA to identify an appropriate path forward for our overflow control program, culminating in the agreed modification that was reached early in 2026,” the city noted in the 2025 report sent March 31 to state and federal officials. “Once the modification is entered, we expect to be on track to meet all of the revised requirements. While negotiating the modification, we continued to make substantial improvements to our sewer utility during 2025 including having projects ready to bid to immediately be able to use the $100 million in debt funding that has become available. Significantly, during 2025, we received agency approval for all of our Capacity Remedial Measures Plans.”

The report includes technical data on sewer system assessments, remedial measures, capacity assessment, hydraulic modeling, the broad capacity, management, operations, and maintenance (CMOM) work, information on the fats, oils and grease (FOG) program, the root control program, and sanitary sewer overflows.

Following are a few of the numerous details in the report.

• There are 508 miles of gravity sewer lines in the city.
• The city completed 76,551 linear feet of remedial sewer line work in 2025, more than the 40,000 required by the consent decree.
• The city completed remedial work on 278 manholes, more than the 200 required.
• In the years prior to 2025, the city conducted 10,563 manhole inspections.
• In the years prior to 2025, the city inspected 2.624 million linear feet of sewer pipe, or 428.84 miles.
• In the years prior to 2025, the city smoke tested 2.421 million linear feet of sewer pipe, or 458.53 miles.
• The city conducted 24,240 linear feet — 84 line segments — of targeted line cleaning during 2025.

“The city also continued using the Sewer Line Rapid Assessment Tool (SL-RAT), to help assess sewer lines with significant blockages, and better determine whether targeted cleaning was required,” noted the report. “A total of 35,580 linear feet (127 line segments) were assessed using the SL-RAT. Of the 127 line segments assessed using SL-RAT, 43 line segments (11,120 linear feet) were determined to have no significant blockages, and were not cleaned in 2025. The remainder of lines assessed with SL-RAT were cleaned as part of the 2025 Annual Report Period.”

COST ESTIMATES, TAX VOTES
The city has estimated that the total cost of consent decree work could approach $800 million. The early estimate was that consent decree work would total about $480 million. The city reports that it spent about $136 million between 2015 and 2024 and spent about $49 million prior to 2015. In May 2020, the EPA and the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) agreed with the city that sewer improvement work will be “inordinately expensive” and gave the city another five years from the initial 12-year mandate to complete the work.

In May 2022, Fort Smith voters passed a 0.75% sales tax from Jan. 1, 2023, to Dec. 31, 2030, with 83.3% of the revenue going to federal consent decree work on the city’s water and sewer system and 16.7% directed to the police department. Funding for consent decree work to date also has come in part from water and sewer bill increases, which were up 167% between 2015 and 2022.

Fort Smith voters in May 2025 approved by a wide margin a sales tax plan to provide $360 million over 30 years to fund federally-mandated sewer system work.

Link here for a PDF of the 123-page consent decree annual report.