The Chickasha Municipal Authority is expected to solicit bids on construction of a new water treatment plant for 45 days, starting in August, and the proposals will be opened “probably in early October,” City Manager Jim Crosby told Southwest Ledger last week.
If the CMA awards a contract that month, the contractor will have to secure bonds, sign various documents, and then mobilize personnel and equipment, Crosby noted.
Should all of that occur without a hiccup, construction would start in December “at best,” he said.
Consulting engineers Freese and Nichols completed the final design of the new facility and submitted the plans to the state Department of Environmental Quality “right after July 4th,” Clay Herndon, F&N’s project manager on Chickasha’s water plant project, told city officials on July 21. Now they are waiting for approval of the plans and issuance of a construction permit, he said.
The new treatment plant will be capable of producing up to 6 million gallons of potable water daily, and will be “expandable” to 8 mgd, CMA and F&N officials have said. Production of 6 mgd “should get you out to the horizon, to about 2060-70,” F&N’s Jason Cocklin told the city council last year.
The new facility will have four filter bays and three lagoon cells for holding “residuals” from the treatment process, Herndon said.
The plant’s treatment process will include pretreatment, clarification, filtration and disinfection, the CMA said. The plant “will have full back-up generation and redundancy,” Cocklin said.
Although the new plant will employ “conventional” water treatment methods, the technological advancements in water purification surpass what was available when Chickasha’s water treatment plant was built 60 or 70 years ago.
“Do we have other options on technology?” Councilman Charlie Burruss asked.
Reverse osmosis was considered but was abandoned because that process is “a lot more expensive to install and more costly to operate,” Crosby said. “Even though the technology” in the new treatment plant “will be similar to what we have now, it will be more advanced than what our original plant was designed for,” he added.
The existing treatment plant was designed to process 6 million gallons of drinking water daily. Now, though, its “functional capacity” is 4.2 million gallons per day to serve the 16,500 residents of Chickasha and the nearby community of Norge, Herndon and Cocklin told the city council on Jan. 16.
The new water plant will be built on three parcels totaling 70 acres west of the city’s aged water plant off Genevieve Street. Construction will take an estimated two years to complete.
Meanwhile, for nearly a year and a half the Chickasha Municipal Authority has been making monthly payments on a loan from the Oklahoma Water Resources Board that will finance most of the cost of the new treatment plant. The balance is expected to be paid from one or more municipal revenue sources.
The 30-year, $67,660,000 loan was approved in July 2023, and the city and state agency closed on the promissory note on Aug. 10, 2023, records show.
The first payments on the debt were made in March and September 2024, Lori Johnson, chief of the OWRB’s Financial Assistance Division, told Southwest Ledger. The CMA submits its payment to its trustee bank, and the bank in turn pays the OWRB.
The CMA is current on its principal and interest payments on the loan, Johnson said on July 23. City claims records show, for example, payments of $1,012,783 on Sept. 13, 2024; $345,187 on Feb. 12, 2025; $502,280 on May 13, 2025; $251,140 on July 3 and another $251,140 on July 16.
An amortization schedule provided to the Ledger by Joe Freeman, former head of the Water Board’s Financial Assistance Division, showed that interest payments on the $67.66 million loan will total $57 million during the life of the loan. The CMA will pay approximately $124.7 million in combined principal and interest on the loan by mid-September 2053.
The OWRB’s amortization schedule also shows the interest rate is 5.20% through 2039; drops to 4.20% from 2040 through 2048; then inches back up to 4.325% through the last payment on 15 September 2053.
Chickasha residents approved a permanent 1.25% sales tax on Aug. 8, 2023, to retire the water plant debt and finance other capital improvements. That levy went into effect Jan. 1, 2024, and generated $5.25 million during the next 19 months, city records reflect. The 1.25% rate replaced a Capital Improvements Program sales tax of three-fourths of a penny that expired at midnight Dec. 31, 2023.