Costs For Wastewater Treatment Plant Increase

By Gordon HopkinsLast year, the City of Fairbury approved plans to renovate the city’s wastewater treatment plant. In March of 2021, the Fairbury City Council voted to file an application for funding with the Clean Water State Revolving Fund (CWSRF) to pay for improvements to the plant. The estimated cost at that time was approximately $3.5 million.Last week, Fairbury City Administrator Robert Messbarger advised FJN, “The current estimated cost for the project is approximately $4 million. The project is on schedule to open the bidding in March of 2022 and begin construction in the summer of 2022.”The last major upgrade to the wastewater treatment plant occurred in 1998. A water treatment system evaluation was completed in March of 2018 and several recommendations were made, including improvements to the headworks, buildings, piping, valves, a new clarifier ring and new grit processing.In addition, the city will need to upgrade the software that runs the treatment plant’s computer system to operate and control all necessary functions. The plant’s software currently utilizes Windows 7. Windows 7 is an outdated software that is no longer supported and no longer receives security upgrades.According to a memorandum from Messbarger, presented at a City Council meeting on Tuesday, January 18, “Continuing to utilize Windows 7 software is risky as it greatly increases the risk for our system to go down, whether through failure of the software or by an intentional external act. Further, if the computer system goes down, it would require an emergency update which would be much more expensive than a normal, planned update.”The City works with Hydro Optimization and Automation (HOA) regarding all technical needs with the plant. HOA provided the City with a quote of $24,212.00 to upgrade the computer software. This cost is in addition to the $4 million Messbarger quoted above.Messbarger wrote, “Although not included in this fiscal year’s budget, staff believes that the City will be able to absorb this cost through reallocation of funds and the City’s healthy cash reserve position. HOA advised this upgrade is long overdue and highly recommends upgrading to a software that is supported.”At the meeting, Messbarger said, “And this upgrade is the basic version, they did have a more advanced version. But with this being an unbudgeted item, staff was proposing this basic version with the option of upgrading in the future once it’s budgeted.”City Councilperson Brian Schmidt asked, “Will this probably be upgraded again, during the plant renovation down there.”Messbarger responded, “I don’t believe so. Initially, this was kind of delayed to see if we could put that in with that project. The size of that project has grown so much that it’s not going to make much of a difference at that point.”

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