COLUMBIA COUNTY / AUGUSTA, GA - As Grovetown officials look to put some teeth into the grease trap ordinance that protects the sewers from excessive restaurant grease, some local restaurant owners feel the city is moving too fast.

According to Planning and Zoning Director Connie Smith, the previous ordinance was insufficient for a community growing as quickly as Grovetown.

“We did have an ordinance in the books,” she says. “It had been there for 20-plus years and was really never enforced.”

Smith says that city officials started looking at the issue when they began noticing some grease blockages in the sewer lines.

“There’s really been no major incidents,” she admits, “but there were some minor blockages that we were able to clean up, and it was apparent in the lines that it was grease from the restaurants.”

Some restaurant owners, however, feel the ordinance that breezed through the city council is too severe, adding an excessive cost that threatens to drive some restaurants out of business.

“I don’t get a corporate check to have my grease trap pumped,” says Armando Reyes, owner of Taqueria Mi Rinconcito and Armando’s Grill and Pizzeria. “Either I pass the cost on to the consumer or I eat it.”

The ordinance revision requires monthly pumpings of under-sink grease traps by a licensed waste disposal firm.

Failure to comply will result in a $1,000 fine, six months in jail and/or a 12-month probation.

The ordinance puts an end to the long-standing practice of restaurants disposing of their own grease.

“Basically, [the ordinance] was a precautionary measure to keep the sanitary sewer system from any overflows,” Smith says.

Hula Dawgs owner Richard Brewton, however, claims the move is overzealous.

“If you keep the trap clean like we do in here, you shouldn’t have to do it but every six months,” he says. “I do everything I can do to keep things clean, to follow every rule and every regulation.”

Dan Loudermilk, a pollution prevention engineer for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, says many municipalities take such a blanket approach to pumping schedules.

“If you really wanted to do it right, you might have some kind of table for the size of the trap and the amount of the grease,” he says. “I think many communities went from lax oversight to major oversight.”

Brewton says the new ordinance was passed without any input from restaurant owners, and he says their complaints have been received by the city with indifference.

Both Reyes and Brewton say the inspector told them that was simply the cost of doing business.

According to Brewton, the cost of pumping his under-sink trap is just under $180 a month.

Smith insists such increased vigilance is necessary to keep the city from having to undergo costly sewer repairs.

“Over the past couple of years, we’ve just got so much growth and so many more restaurants coming in that we really want to get it under control pretty much before it gets out of hand.”

And while she’s certainly heard the complaints, she’s not backing down.

“It can be requested to be more frequently pumped, but we will not go any looser,” she says, adding that the city has its eye on more than just pumping schedules. “Now that it’s being enforced, we will mandate what size traps go in, too.