(Wahpeton)– The Wahpeton City Council Monday evening held a public hearing on a planned expansion and improvements to the town’s water treatment plant. Mark Hardy, an engineer with the Howard R. Green Engineering firm that’s designing the project, presented the information…
“We’re going to continue to use water from West Okoboji. It’s a very high quality source. We’re going to, like I said, re-use some of the existing equipment and at the plant. Your existing plant was originally constructed in 1972, upgraded in 1991 and the latest major improvements were back in 2004. So our main driver of the project is increased capacity. There is some EPA and state regulations that the plant’s having a little bit difficulty meeting and this will improve that by removing some organics out of the water and get that removal to help us meet those limits. And also kind of a side benefit is we’re going to be increasing redundancy. We’re going to have multiple sets of treatment trains that will if something goes down and we have to do some maintenance we can have another treatment train to help us with that and the plant won’t have to be totally shut down to do that, so it’s going to be a big improvement over some of the operations you have now. And then some of the equipment has reached the end of its useful life and we’re going to be replacing that.”
Hardy says they continue to further define the plans and will have another update in February. He says the current plans call for a bid letting in early May with construction possibly beginning this summer. He says completion wouldn’t occur until spring of 2027.
Just how the city would fund the project is uncertain as of now. It has an estimated cost of $11.7 million. There has been some preliminary talk of possibly increasing water rates instead of issuing bonds. But the significant rate increase that would be required has drawn concern from at least one council member. Mayor Phil Johnson indicated there will be further discussion on that in the near future.
