Note: this is one of two related articles today. See: “How Residential Growth, a State Order and Intense Rains Are Forcing Palm Coast’s Hand on Sewer Expansion.”
Addressing one of the most critical issues hampering the city’s infrastructure–and facing an order from the state to expand sewer capacity–the Palm Coast City Council on Tuesday took a pair of momentous steps that by next spring will result in higher water and sewer rates to help pay for a nearly quarter-billion dollar expansion of one of the city’s two sewer plants.
Because of sharp growth since 2020, that plant has been operating at or beyond capacity in some months, resulting in the consent decree from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
The council unanimously approved a $5 million contract to design the expansion of one of that plant, ahead of projected construction. Only a portion of the $240 million construction can legally be covered by development impact fees–the one-time fees levied on builders for new homes and businesses to defray the “impact” of that new population on the city’s utility’s infrastructure. Absent grants or unexpected new revenue, the rest has to be paid through water and sewer rates, which are currently too low to shoulder that burden.
The council also approved spending $70,000 on an analysis that will determine what the new rates will be, and to lay out a five-year road map for the city’s utility infrastructure. The analysis will be completed in the next few months. A council with three new members will be voting on those rates next spring.
The city has no choice. Nor will the new council after it is seated in November
“Infrastructure Projects will need to be properly funded by strict deadlines to meet the Consent Decree requirements,” Amanda Rees, the city’s utility director, told the council, using language even more direct than similar language her predecessor used when he was seeking higher rates earlier this year. He was no longer the utility director the following month. (City officials say it had nothing to do with his presentation: he took a different position at the utility.) “Postponing action today does not save in the long term,” Rees said. To the contrary. It’ll cost more by he time the city gets around to paying for whatever it defers.
The current council raised utility impact fees in March, but declined to raise rates. It was hoping to defray coming costs with state appropriations. Those did not materialize. The city has high hopes still to defray those costs through a Department of Environmental Protection grant pending at the agency.
“We know we’re going to raise rates. We have to. It’s just is what it is,” City Council member Theresa Pontieri said Tuesday. She and her colleagues asked a few questions during the related utility presentations toward the end of a daylong meeting. But the city administration was not challenged this time by any of the council members, as it had been in March. The council was resigned to what’s ahead, though three of its members (Mayor David Alfin, Council members Nick Klufas and Ed Danko) will not have to deal with it. Klufas had supported higher rates in March.
Earlier in the meeting, a couple of dozen residents addressed the council, many of them angrily, about flooding issues during Hurricane Milton, including Cornelia Manfre, who criticized what she characterized as a lack of infrastructure planning. The chamber was mostly empty by the time the council took up the utility issues, however. “A whole group left out of here today thinking that perhaps there is no plan, and yet,” a dispirited Alfin said, “in fact, we’re sitting here going through what is a plan, and that’s just something to be thinking about for the future.”
It only seemed complicated. But the plans are straightforward.
The city runs two sewer plants, which it calls wastewater treatment facilities. WWFF-1 is at 26 Utility Drive, off Old Kings Road in the Woodlands. It is 40 years old. It is permitted for just under 7 million gallons per day sewage and stormwater treatment. It handles most of the customers between U.S. 1 and the eastern city limits. That’s the problem plant that runs over capacity some months, in heavy rain events, and the city’s workhorse. WWTF-2 is at 400 Peavy Grade, off U.S. 1, which handles primarily the developments along the U.S. 1 corridor.
WWTF-2 started running in 2018 at 2 million gallons per day, or just a fifth of the city’s capacity. It is being expanded to handle 4 million gallons by next year, or 40 percent of the city’s effluents. By then, it will also accommodate half a million gallons diverted from WWTF-1, relieving some pressure there before the expansion. But WWTF-2 can no longer be expanded. A third, brand new sewer plant is not planned until 2035. Until then, WWTF-1 has to be expanded.
“My understanding is that Wastewater Treatment Plant two was designed at one point, and then it was tabled when there was a slowdown in the economy,” Alex Blake, a utility engioneer, said. “Then it was picked back up because growth had started back up, and there was interest in the in the U.S. 1 corridor, so we built that, and they became active in 2018 over that period of time. Starting in 2020 we realized, well, we’ve got to start planning to build more capacity into that facility.” The design was done, and construction began.
WWTF-1 is nearing its capacity of 6.83 million gallons per day. For all its age and wear, it can still be expanded. In late 2023, the city began studying a further expansion to 10.83 million gallons per day, which is its permitted treatment limit. The city engineers also determined that, oxymorons aside, effluents could be treated even better. The facility could be an “advanced wastewater treatment” facility, so recycled effluents would be cleaner by reducing nitrogen and phosphorus content below the limits of the current process. Doing so allows the discharge of those waters into wetlands, rivers or the Intracoastal, which helps recharge the aquifer. It also helps relieve pressure on the sewer system and the city’s infrastructure. State regulators have not made the approach mandatory until 2032. But it is already becoming the industry standard. The city sees no reason to wait.
CPH, the engineering and consulting firm, has already worked on previous design improvements at the wastewater plant. It won the contract to study the WWTF-1 expansion, with an option to go on to design the expansion–two separate parts of the project. The expansion design alone will cost $5 million. That’s the step the council approved Tuesday. Construction will take three to four years. The project’s construction is budgeted for Fiscal Year 2025.
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