The landscape at Fayetteville’s wastewater plant is changing by the day. What was solid ground with council members shoveling dirt at the groundbreaking only weeks ago at the First Manassas Mile facility has quickly become the beginnings of the plant’s third aerobic digester.

Also underway is the excavation for a new pump station and clearing and grading work for a new, lined five million-gallon equalization basin.

The current $11.8 million upgrade of the city’s wastewater treatment plant is designed to meet Fayetteville’s needs through the city’s build-out phase in the next 15 years.

The 18-month upgrade project is the city’s largest ever. It will effectively double the wastewater capacity to five million gallons per day (MGD), providing a state-of-the-art facility that will serve the city well into the build-out phase, city officials said.

“The build-out of Fayetteville is our only concern,” City Manager Joe Morton said earlier. “Best guess, looking at all the numbers and all the build-out projections, looking at vacant land within our corporate city limits, we’ve run the numbers on all that kind of stuff. (The wastewater treatment need) is somewhere around four million gallons per day, that’s what we are anticipating. Now that could vary. We’re trying to encourage a lot of re-development inside the city. If you get something a little more intense that may bump it up a little bit.”

“The upgrade is also meant to give us a buffer for maintenance activities,” Morton added. “Right now we’re basically at capacity. Maintenance had not been done on the existing plant since it was built in 1992 so we haven’t been able to take it down to do any heavy maintenance.”

Reviewing the facility’s history, Water and Sewer Director Rick Eastin said the wastewater treatment system originally processed 1.25 MGD and is now processing 2.2 MGD on a system that can handle 2.5 MGD. The upgrade will handle the projected 4 MGD need with room to spare for system wide maintenance activities.

“The original facility that was built in 1978 was shut down when we built the new facility in 1991 and all the flow was diverted to it,” Eastin said. “We did that with intention of, at a future time, coming back and rehabbing the existing facility with a higher capacity, utilizing all the tankage and things we could use. The original capacity of that facility was 1.25 MGD and we upped that to 2.5 MGD (in 1991). The new facility is also 2.5, so that will give us an overall capacity of 5.0 million.”

Throughout the process leading to the upgrade, city officials reiterated that the project is designed to meet Fayetteville’s future needs. Once completed, the system upgrade will easily handle the capacity needed when build-out occurs in the next 15 years and provide the means to perform needed maintenance tasks that will prolong the life of the system.

“So what we have planned is to provide the city with adequate treatment capacity now and at build-out and also to give us some room to do some maintenance along the way,” Eastin said. “Doing that reduces your cost. If you’re able to take a treatment train off-line on an annual basis to do cleaning and maintenance it makes the system last longer. You’ll be increasing it 20-30 years with proper maintenance.”

Occurring simultaneously with the facility upgrade was an April 6 vote to increase water and sewer rates by 15 percent beginning in June and the potential for additional nine percent increases in 2007 and again in 2008. Reasons cited for the three rate hikes were increases in operating expenses, building a reserve for Water and Sewer renewal and replacement of assets and to encourage water conservation.

“This is not a one-year fix,” Assistant Director of Finance Ellen Walls told the council April 6. “We need to do it over a period of time and study it annually. We thought doing it over three years was the thing to do. Doing it all at once would be irresponsible to the citizens.”

The last major capital improvement to the wastewater system occurred in 1991. It was determined in 2003 that 5 MGD was needed to provide system redundancy and capacity through the estimated 2025 city build-out based on the existing service area.

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