Costs For Wastewater
Treatment Plant Upgrades
Continue To Increase

By Gordon Hopkins Last year, the City of Fairbury approved plans to renovate the city’s wastewater treatment plant. The estimated cost presented to the Fairbury City Council at that time was approximately $3.5 million. In January of this year, 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.” Not included in those estimates is an upgrade to 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 Windows 7 is an outdated software that is no longer supported and no longer receives security upgrades.On January 18, 2022, the Fairbury City Council approved the purchase of a computer upgrade from Hydro Optimization and Automation (HOA), which handles all related technical needs for the city’s utility departments. HOA recommended the upgrade as the current system utilized is no longer supported and is at a higher security risk. At a subsequent meeting on February 15, it was revealed the upgrade would cost approximately $5,000 more than originally quoted. The city administrator explained the change in a memo presented at the meeting, “HOA initially provided the city with quotes for two different systems, WinCC and VTSCADA. At that time, HOA believed that both of these systems would be suitable and compatible for Fairbury. As this upgrade was not included in the budget, staff presented the cheaper quote of $24,212 for the WinCC system with the idea of upgrading at a later time if deemed necessary. After council approved this quote, HOA informed staff that the WinCC system is no longer recommended. They listed several concerns including server coordination, reboot time, delayed systems, lack of support, susceptibility to corruptness, and inefficient memory usage. HOA acknowledged that they made a mistake initially and shouldn’t have offered the WinCC system. HOA still recommends upgrading to the VTSCADA system to address the existing issues. The initial quote for the VTSCADA system was $35,035. In acknowledging their mistake, HOA has offered to reduce this quote to $29,623.50. Staff still believes the city would be able to absorb this expense.” At the meeting, Messbarger explained why the city could not look for a cheaper alternative from another company, “We’ve been with HOA for over 20 years. They control our SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems for all utility departments. So it’s kind of a single source deal on this unless council wanted to look at a completely different SCADA system altogether. But we’re kind of tied in on with HOA at this time.” The city council voted to approve the additional cost, though one member of the council expressed his displeasure.“We hear this song and dance every once in a while and I get tired of hearing it,” said city councilperson Kelly Davis. “If they can knock $5,411 right off the top, then they were jabbing us to start with, is my feeling.”Mayor Spencer Brown said, “Somebody screwed up.”“But we pay for them screw ups quite often,” Davis said. “I know we got to do it. I understand that.”The mayor responded, “We’ve had this conversation already. If there was another way around this and at least hold their feet to the fire, we would do it.”

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