Cottonwood City Council voted 6-1 against hiring an outside consultant to determine how and if to fix problems at the Riverfront Water Reclamation Facility.
Many council members suggested during the discussion at the May 3 meeting that the decision is the beginning of a tentative process to close the beleaguered facility.
The motion would have spent close to $90,000 from the Wastewater Budget on the consultant. After a discussion of the history and problems with the plant, Councilwoman Debbie Wilden made a counter-motion to not spend the money.
Councilman Doug Hulse voted against the motion.
Inadequate Facility
According to Cottonwood Utilities Director Tom Whitmer, the Riverfront Water Reclamation Facility had its genesis in 2008. By 2011, the contracted firm PLC put together a proposal in the range of $15 million, significantly higher than the projects $8 million to $9.5 million councilmembers and city staff initially estimated spending.
The then-council canceled the contract with PLC and “began stripping components off of the original plant that was conceived for the Riverfront area,” Whitmer said.
In 2014, council contracted with Felix Construction with a guaranteed management price of $10.4 million.
Whitmer said he was “drug into the project in 2015 to try and find a solution for disposing of the effluent.”
Whitmer said the vision was to create a state-of-the-art plant powered mainly by solar panels with an education center and a STEM education component.
Whitmer said the plan was to release the A-plus-rated water into the Verde River, which is cleaner than the river water. The problem, he said, is that water that clean is actual harmful to the marine life and invertebrates in a natural river so the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality denied the plan.
ADEQ also told the city that the reclamation plant could not irrigate Riverfront Park and nearby areas due to potential contamination of the Verde River.
Whitmer said running pipes to irrigate other areas, such as the Cottonwood Kids Park and Cottonwood Middle School gets costly when piping costs $125 to $200 per linear foot and was initially not the plan.
So the city drilled a test injection well next to the plant to recharge the aquifer and discovered the well went into a confined aquifer system, i.e., one under pressure. The well could inject five gallons per minute, or about 7,200 gallons per day, but as the plant produced 288,000 gallon of effluent per day, it would require injecting 200 gallons per minute.
There were also questions about where to irrigate, if that was the solution. ADEQ has strict rules on calculating water credits for adding water back to an aquifer, determining how water remains in the base aquifer without flowing out, such as seeping into a waterway down stream, meaning that by irrigation such credits would be lost.
The plant opened in 2019, but the components of the plant — the UV storage system, turbidity monitoring system, filtration system — were essentially operating on timers and not in sync with each other. Additionally, during the stripping down process between 2011 and 2014, the plan wasn’t built with a dual filtration system, just a single one, and no advanced oxidation system. The UV and disinfection systems were added in 2017 and 2018 as “an afterthought,” Whitmer said.
The total cost wound up closer to $13 million or $14 million, Whitmer said.
One of the problems since the opening is that the plant ceases operations for one to two hours every night.
Whitmer added that the plant failed to produce A-plus-rated water through the AeroMod Sequox Plus treatment system.
According to the agenda, “In just the last year, staff has had the manufacturer out no less than half a dozen times and there is rarely a week that goes by that staff isn’t on the phone with the [AeroMod] manufacturer. To date the manufacturer has yet to come up with a solution that enables the plant to operate effectively for more than a couple of days before another issue occurs resulting in the quality of reclaimed water deteriorating below compliance standards.”
“We started calling around to other places where they had this similar type plant, the AeroMod system, and in the process of doing that we found out that everybody that we talked to was also having the same problems,” Whitmer told council. “Fortunately for them though their permit was for B quality water as opposed to A-plus, so they can meet the B quality, but they can’t meet the A-plus with what they’ve got there without some serious modifications.”
Right now, Whitmer said, water treated at Riverfront goes through lift stations No. 3 and No. 4 up to the Mingus wastewater plant and it treated a second time.
With all these issues and problems, the question Whitmer put before council was to “award an engineering services contract for an amount not to exceed $89,487 to Hazen and Sawyer for the assessment and evaluation of the Riverfront Water Reclamation Facility.”
Council Discussion
Responding to a question from Councilman Tosca Henry, Whitmer said that a second plant like Riverfront isn’t necessary in the next 20 to 30 years, but that the Mingus plant will need to be expanded at some point to handle an increase in wastewater.
“So we ended up with a $14-million sprinkler system that doesn’t work every day,” Councilman Michael Mathews said.
Whitmer told Henry and council that the plant handles 0.98 million gallons per day for the city’s 12,000 residents, with a capacity of 1.5 million gpd, possible 1.6 million gpd following refurbishments. With an expansion, it could handle up to 2 million gpd, when the city nears build-out and has a population around 20,000 to 25,000.
Whitmer added that at the time Riverfront was built, it was a good time to look at a second plant. The Mingus plant had only been treating 1.2 million gpd, and the city was producing 0.8 million gpd.
While the population has increased by about 800 residents since 2010, water usage has slowed. When the city purchased private water companies in the area, customers were using 3,600 acre feet of water, which fell to as low as 2,400 acre feet and is now around 3,000 acre feet.
“I’m not interested in throwing good money after bad,” Henry said. “I’m interested in stopping the bleed now.”
“I absolutely agree; it’s common sense in my book,” Wilden said.
“I’m in the same position: Stop the bleeding, shut it down, step back. It was just — it’s bad from beginning to end and I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel,” Mathews said.
Whitmer said that shutting it down is cheap, but formally decommissioning the plant would not be free, as there are costs associated with that through ADEQ.
Whitmer told Councilman Doug Hulse that the equipment in the facility could be repurposed or auctioned off, but the main building would likely not be torn down as it could still be used as “an excellent site for meetings and conferences.”
“Are we sure I can’t make the motion for a field trip to shut the valve off?” Councilwoman Helaine Kurot asked. “I see no reason to keep putting money into this. I think we’re better off just cutting our losses.”
City Manager Ron Corbin reminded council that the motion is only about the contract, not whether to keep open or close the plant, which could be determined at a later meeting.
Hulse voted against the Wilden’s motion to not pay for the consultant, saying the money is a “drop in the bucket” compared to what had already been spent and that he would like to know the exact problems from an outside consultant.
Wilden and Mayor Tim Elinski both said the city could conduct such an inquiry at any time, should council decide later it is worth the effort.
Christopher Fox Graham can be reached at (928) 282-7795, ext. 129, or by email to editor@larsonnewspapers.com
