VOORHEESVILLE – Following an audit and $6,200 in fines last year by the the federal Environmental Protection Agency for violations of the Clean Water Act, the village is now in compliance with the law, according to Tayler Covington, a spokeswoman for the EPA.

The fines, which are paid off, were for administrative issues the village had with its stormwater management program (SWMP), because it didn’t have its own program.

Voorheesville had been part of the Stormwater Coalition of Albany County, which had a members-only SWMP in place, but left the coalition in 2013 as fees increased and the village felt that it could manage its own SWMP at less cost, according to Glenn Hebert, Voorheesville’s code enforcement officer.

Voorheesville operates its own municipal separate storm sewer system that discharges stormwater, a pollutant, into the Vly Creek, a tributary of the Hudson River.

The fines, Hebert said, were issued because the village continued to use the coalition’s SWMP and did not have its program, which it needed. The village hired the engineering firm Barton and Loguidice to create a SWMP.

Some examples of the 24 violations reported by The Enterprise were:

– Not all the village storm drains were stencilled to warn against dumping waste in them. Hebert said that the drains were now stenciled and this year the village will be placing medallions on the storm drains because the stenciling wears off;

– An annual required report by the building inspector was prepared but not presented publicly at a meeting. The report was presented at the April 24 Board of Trustee meeting;

– Voorheesville had not kept up with requirements for mapping outfalls. An outfall is the discharge point of a waste stream into a body of water. The up-to-date map hangs in Hebert’s office at the village hall;

– Voorheesville had no documentation of an ordinance requiring post-construction runoff controls from new development and redevelopment projects nor did it have a post-construction program by trained staff to perform inspections. The village has had an ordinance on the books since 2006, Hebert said, but again, Voorheesville did not have its own SWMP and therefore the ordinance wasn’t documented; and

– The village did not have written procedures for receipt and follow-up on complaints by the public regarding construction-site stormwater runoff. The SWMP presented at the April 24 village meeting does this. ​