Eric Kerr came to the Chicopee Wastewater Treatment plant four years ago to find a 1970s facility running on mostly original equipment.Kerr and the staff have been steadily renewing and replacing equipment, and design is in progress for a $60 million upgrade, mainly to enable nitrification/denitrification to meet a new NPDES permit limit for effluent nitrogen discharges in the Connecticut River.But something else needed rebuilding: the level of professionalism on the operations and maintenance teams. “We have a good culture here,” says Kerr, chief operator at Chicopee, a western Massachusetts city of 55,000.“My biggest thing is to build rapport
