On October 22, 2024, the Wichita City Council held a workshop at 455 N. Main Street, Wichita, KS, starting at 9:00 a.m. The agenda included three presentations: the future of the current water treatment plant, proposed 2025 water and sewer rate adjustments, and a 10-year overview of the public art program. No formal votes were taken; council members offered feedback and direction for future action.
You today, uh two of them are related and they discuss um uh future plans for our uh water uh delivery system or treatment and delivery system. The first one is a discussion about the future of the existing water plant. And so I'd like staff uh to present um the work that has been done to this point assessing the condition and the uh options for that plant and recommendations from not just staff but a working advisory board as well. So with that, I'll turn it over to Gary Jackson. Good morning, Mayor, uh council members. I'm just gonna be very brief here and introduce this, and then manager gave you a head start. So, you know, as we move towards uh bringing our new water treatment plant online sometime next spring, there's gonna be a period of time where we'll be operating both plants, but it's likely by early 2026, we'll be uh bringing our current water treatment plant offline. Um, and so we've spent the last 12 months or more evaluating options for for what to do next with that facility. Um Laura Quick, our utilities optimization manager and expert in a lot of other areas has led this effort for us. And so I'm gonna turn it over to her and let her walk you through the options that we've looked at. We focused on uh that really started to move towards wanting to use this facility uh in an emergency situation. So you'll see that most of the options she's gonna discuss with you and we discuss with the steering committee, uh kind of look to that. But we also looked at other options too, uh, what future growth might look like and some of those needs. So I'm gonna turn it over to Laura. Thank you. All right, thank you. I'm Laura Quick with the City of Wichita uh Public Works and Utilities Utilities Optimization program. Um so just a brief agenda for today. Um, gonna be going over each of these things with you, a purpose, a history, um, brief summary of our current water demands, um, some example condition assessment findings that we have found, um, alternatives that we've looked at, and um high-level cost estimates associated with those. I have a steering committee and staff recommendation to go over with you, and then we'll talk about some next steps. Um so to give you some context for why we're here today, um, as Gary mentioned, the new Wichita Waterworks project is nearing completion and should be coming online in April of 2025. Uh, from that point, both plants are expected to operate simultaneously for about eight to twelve months. We don't want to take the current plant offline until we've put the new plant through its paces, given it a chance to operate in all seasons, high demand, low demand, things like that. Um so we do need to start talking about what are we going to do with the current water treatment plant, or you'll often heard it referred to as main water treatment plant, MWTP. We're gonna have to stop calling it that at some point. But um, these are the questions that we are trying to answer. What function will it serve? Um, what budget do we need for it to serve that function, and what staff resources are we going to need. Um, so really today this falls into the category of things that you guys mentioned earlier where we don't have a specific item we're ready to bring you yet. We're not ready for a decision. Um, this today is about are we on the right path or is there a different path that you'd like us to explore? Um so earlier this year we contracted with Burns and McDonald to develop options and high-level cost estimates, and this presentation today is the result of that work. Uh brief history of the current water treatment plant. Um, the initial part of the plant was constructed in 1939, so we're now 85 years old for the oldest parts of the plant. It was expanded in 1953. Um 1992, we had a partial rehab. Um, and then skip forward to 2011 through 2016. The plants now around at that time was around 75 years old. Age was starting to become apparent. We um it was clear that trying to maintain it was becoming more costly, so we started looking at options um for rehabilitating the current plant or replacing it with a new one. Uh back in 2016 is when we ultimately decided to construct the new Wichita waterworks plant after determining that rehab wouldn't be enough to reduce the overall risk associated with continuing to rely on the old water plant as our water source for around half a million people. Um so 2017 to present has taken us through design um construction, expected now to complete in April of 2025, and as Gary mentioned, should be taking the um current plant offline probably around 2026. So we wanted to know how much water do we need and how long will the capacity at our new plant be enough. So we looked at some historical trends. We looked at trends in both the daily average water use as well as the highest single day for any given year. What you see on this chart, I know it's kind of hard to read, but the break in the middle is 2024, so that's present. So everything to the left of that would be our historical actual usage. Everything to the right would be our future projections. The bottom line reflects our average consumption. The top line reflects our single highest day for any given year.