The new Collinsville water treatment plant will be directly to the east of the existing plant, along Collinsville Road.
The exact location of the new structure was unveiled to the public for the first time Monday at a special meeting of the City Council. The new building will remove only one of the 12 existing baseball and softball fields at the Collinsville Jaycee Sports Complex. The field used by the Kahok Softball team will not be impacted.
The estimated completion date for the plant remains 2016. Construction is estimated to begin in the spring of 2015.
The purpose of the special meeting Monday was to get final direction from the City Council on the specifics of the new building. Based on a study conducted by Hurst-Rosche Engineers Inc, the Council agreed that the previous goal of re-using the existing 51.5-foot diameter cone was not cost effective. The Council also agreed that the new plant would have two, new, enclosed 47-foot-diameter cones.
Cones are locations where water is clarified. It is the primary point where iron, manganese and hardness are removed, Director of Water/Wastewater Dennis Kress said.
A building covering the cones will reduce maintenance costs and improve security, Kress said. There are no current Environmental Protection Agency requirements that cones be covered, but Kress and Scott Hunt, of Hurst-Roche, think the regulations may be issued in the future. The cone at the existing plant is uncovered.
Replacing the existing 51.5-foot-diameter cone with two 47-foot cones will help build redundancy into the system, an EPA requirement. Each cone is rated at 4.4 million gallons, allowing for a pumping capacity of 4.4 million gallons during maintenance. Two cones have always been in the plans for the new plant.
Hunt estimated that the existing cone would need to be replaced in 20 years, at an estimated cost of $1.5 million. If the replacement cost is figured into the annual maintenance costs of the plant, buying two new cones would slightly decrease annual costs, Hunt said.
The decision to enclose the cones will cost $734,548 above the original budget, which did not include a building over the cones. The $45,000 per year, or 6 cents per 1,000 gallons of water use, will be absorbed by Collinsville water customers, although there is a possibility water rates will not increase.
City of Collinsville Finance Director Tamara Ammann said the water rates have been set for 2014, 2015 and 2016 assuming a 2 percent finance rate for the loan to be secured through the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency’s State Revolving Fund and an estimated cost for construction. The city has now been locked into a 1.95 percent rate by the IEPA, Kress said. The actual cost of construction will not be known until much further into the process.
