After years of soggy and sometimes smelly conditions at Ocean Park in Oak Bluffs that some residents and officials suspected were due to failing septic grids beneath the park, the Department of Environmental Protection recently confirmed the source of the problem and formally notified the town that it is in violation of state law.

In a notice of noncompliance dated Sept. 22, Jeffrey E. Gould of the Department of Environmental Protection bureau of resource protection, said an inspection conducted in late August found that effluent beds under the park are not operating properly, causing treated effluent to come to the surface periodically.

“The [town] shall take all reasonable steps to minimize or prevent any adverse impacts on human health or the environmental resulting from non-compliance with a permit,” Mr. Gould stated in the notice.

News of the notice was made public at the Oak Bluffs selectmen’s meeting Tuesday night.

The town now has two months to hire a professional engineer and four months to submit an engineering report that outlines what modifications will be made to correct the problem.

The notice of noncompliance also stipulates that all breakouts of treated effluent within Ocean Park must cease immediately. If a breakout does occur the affected area must be fenced off with no access for people or animals. And the irrigation system in the park must be shut down until the problem is corrected.

There are 28 separate leaching fields beneath the park capable of carrying 370,000 gallons per day of treated effluent. The fields are part of a $17 million wastewater treatment system built almost a decade ago.

In recent years, there has been much debate about the source of periodic flooding at the park. Some residents have reported smelling sewage, but town wastewater officials said the odor was coming from bird droppings and rotting grass.

The pooling is generally concentrated in an area near the flagpole and usually occurs in the summer months. Ocean Park is one of the most visible and widely used parks on the Vineyard, especially in the summer months when it is a hub of activity with families, children, tourists, kite-flyers and old-fashioned band concerts on Sunday evenings.

Town wastewater superintendent Joe Alosso said this week that the town has already hired the Hyannis engineering firm of Stearns & Wheler to perform the engineering survey. The same company issued separate reports in February of 2006 and January of 2007 about flooding in the park.

Both reports suggested several factors may have led to the flooding, including an inaccurate assessment of the field’s carrying capacity for the leach fields, or mechanical problems associated with the distribution system. Both reports recommended that additional testing be done, including taking certain septic beds off-line to gauge what areas of the grid are working.

That work was done.

Mr. Alosso said he still believes the low-lying areas of the park are a key contributor to the flooding. He said treated effluent is pumped into the park by mechanized pumps which does not allow enough time for the effluent to properly percolate.

“The effluent can’t go down anymore. Since it is being pumped into the fields it only has one way to go — and that’s up,” he said.

Mr. Alosso said one solution may be to install infiltrators in a small area of the park — perhaps as few as six of the 28 effluent beds, or U-shaped piping that would provide more storage than the current stone beds below the surface.

And while he held out hope the problem could be solved relatively easily and at a small cost, he also said he was prepared to support a plan to divert some of the effluent to new treatment beds at a another property recently purchased by the town near the wastewater treatment plant.

He said the land, known as the Leonardo property, could be used to locate several open sand pits to handle overflow of treated effluent during the summer. Open air sand beds are more efficient and can handle roughly twice the flow the stone beds under Ocean Park, Mr. Alosso said.

He also noted he was not the town wastewater superintendent when the current sewer plant and leaching system was designed and approved almost ten years ago. “I know back then officials didn’t have a lot of options . . . there just weren’t a lot of places to locate these beds. But if it were up to me, I’d like to get out of Ocean Park now altogether,” he said.

Town administrator Michael Dutton had a different view. “I don’t think we will ever give up those leaching beds under Ocean Park — if for no other reason than a lack of available space and the considerable money we spent [building them]. But if you look ahead 10 years I don’t think there is any question we will have other leaching sites,” he said yesterday.

Selectman Kerry Scott said the notice simply confirms what many people have suspected for years.

“I sounded the alarm on this two or three years ago. But it takes an order of noncompliance from the state all these years later to finally force us to act. We wasted all this time arguing over geese droppings and irrigation systems,” she said, adding:

“If you ask me, the wastewater plant manager should have known better.”