The Chickasha Municipal Authority will soon begin soliciting bids for construction of a new water treatment plant.
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 4,” Clay Herndon, F&N’s project manager on Chickasha’s water plant project, told city officials on July 21.
The city is waiting for DEQ to approve the plans and specifications and issue a construction permit. A meeting with representatives of the state agency is scheduled for Sept. 9 to discuss “several items we need to correct,” City Manager Jim Crosby said. “When that’s done, then we’ll go out for bids.”
The project will be advertised for “probably six weeks,” Crosby told Southwest Ledger last Thursday, “because it’s a big, complicated job.”
“We’ll send notices to a variety of companies,” he said. The CMA also will advertise in newspapers in several states and in the Journal Record in Oklahoma City, and in “some big publications,” Crosby said. “There also are some magazines that contractors subscribe to.”
The CMA is “trying to get as many bids as possible,” he said. “Normally, you get maybe five or six bids, because there’s so much competition for jobs that are on the market at any given time.”
If the CMA awards a contract in November, the winner will have to secure bonds, sign various documents and then mobilize equipment and personnel. Should all of that occur without a hiccup, construction would start in December at the earliest, but probably in January.
“It’s an exciting time for Chickasha,” Crosby 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 plant’s water purification 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.
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, aged 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.
The existing treatment plant will be demolished after the new plant becomes operational, according to Gary McDaniel, project manager for U.S Water Services Corp., which has contracts to operate Chickasha’s water and wastewater treatment plants.
CMA loan payments have been on time Meanwhile, the Chickasha Municipal Authority has been making regular 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 CMA is current on its principal and interest payments on the loan, Lori Johnson, chief of the OWRB’s Financial Assistance Division, told the Ledger last Friday. The CMA submits its payments to its trustee bank, and the bank in turn pays the OWRB.
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 creeps 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; the levy went into effect Jan. 1, 2024. The 1.25% rate replaced a Capital Improvements Program sales tax of thr eefourths of a penny that expired at midnight Dec. 31, 2023.