The Chickasha Municipal Authority began soliciting bids this week on construction of a new water treatment plant.
On Sept. 2 the CMA authorized City Manager Jim Crosby to begin advertising for bids on the project. However, the CMA first had to get authorization from the state Department of Environmental Quality for five variances; those were formally approved in a letter Crosby said he received from the DEQ on Oct. 20.
The water plant project will be advertised for six weeks, he said.
“We’ll send notices to a variety of companies,” Crosby told Southwest Ledger. The CMA also will advertise in newspapers in several states and in the Journal Record in Oklahoma City, and in “some big publications,” he 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.”
Crosby said the bids will be opened during the second week in December. Plans are for the contract to be awarded in late December or early January, he told the Ledger.
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, the CMA and consulting engineers from Freese and Nichols 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, Cocklin and Clay Herndon, F&N’s project manager on Chickasha’s water plant project, told the city council on Jan. 16.
Construction of the new water treatment plant will take an estimated two years to complete. The existing treatment plant will be demolished after the new treatment plant becomes operational, according to Gary McDaniel, project manager for U.S Water Services Corp.
USW contracts with the CMA to manage Chickasha’s water and wastewater treatment plants. The October bill for operation of the water plant was $114,570; for the sewage treatment plant, the October bill was $68,605.
70 acres acquired for new water plant The new water plant will be built on three parcels totaling 70 acres west of the city’s aged water plant off Genevieve Street, Crosby said. The new facility will be named “The Erwin Family Waterworks” after the local family that’s providing the land on which it will be constructed.
The CMA will lease the land for a maximum of 50 years or until the death of Evie Erwin, “whichever is earlier,” the lease agreement provides. After her passing the land will be gifted to the city, Crosby said.
That provision “honors Ms. Erwin’s promise to her father that she would never sell the land,” he explained.
During her lifetime the CMA will pay the Evie Jo Erwin 2012 Revocable Trust $2,500 per month for the land; payments have been made each month since April 1. The CMA will pay all utility bills and taxes on the acreage for the duration of the lease.
The CMA also will spend up to $40,000 for a memorial in the lobby of the new water plant that will memorialize Ms. Erwin’s family, the lease agreement stipulates.
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 in August 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 Thursday. Earlier this month the CMA paid $345,507 on the debt, City Hall records reflect.
An amortization schedule provided to the Ledger by Joe Freeman, former chief 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 three-fourths of a penny that expired at midnight Dec. 31, 2023.
Chickasha water source, quality Chickasha buys water from Fort Cobb Lake, and the quality of the water processed in the treatment plant is marginal. “Our water is good, but not that good,” Crosby acknowledged.
Chickasha’s contract with the Fort Cobb Master Conservancy District allows the municipality to draw up to 5,125 acrefeet of water (almost 1.67 billion gallons) per year, Office Manager Ginger Abbott told Southwest Ledger.
The city’s water consumption totaled 1.037 billion gallons in calendar year 2022 and 1.093 billion gallons in 2023, FCMCD records reflect. But usage soared to 4,988.95 acre-feet – 1.625 billion gallons – in 2024, FCMCD’s meters showed.
As the community grows, “We will not receive any more water rights from our present source, Fort Cobb Reservoir,” Crosby said previously. “I think our water rights will be reduced” by the Master Conservancy District, he said during a City Council meeting Dec. 16.
FCMCD “wants us to find an alternative source of water” to supplement Chickasha’s withdrawals from Fort Cobb Lake, former mayor Chris Mosley told the Ledger.
“Our best and only [alternative] source is water from Lake Chickasha,” Crosby said. Consequently, in the future Chickasha plans to blend water from Fort Cobb Lake with water from Lake Chickasha.
Lake Chickasha water has “a lot of gypsum,” former City Councilman Brian Gerdes noted.
“It’s something we’ll have to treat in the new water plant,” Crosby acknowledged.
Research performed on Lake Chickasha 30 years ago by the state Conservation Commission detected “high sulfate concentrations originating from gypsum deposits in the geologic formations under the lake…” Water quality data collected as part of the state’s lake assessment program also indicated high levels of dissolved solids and elevated levels of chlorophyll-a, which is a measure of algal biomass that is used to indicate or determine productivity in a lake. “The more chlorophyll-a is detected, the greater the level of algae,” an OWRB official told the Ledger.
Lake Chickasha is located in Caddo County, near Verden, approximately nine miles west of Chickasha. The lake was impounded in 1958, OWRB records reflect.
To ensure that Lake Chickasha will be a viable source of drinking water as well as a recreational destination, the City of Chickasha intends to raise the lake level by 10 feet, Crosby announced last December.
“It will probably take several years,” perhaps a decade, to achieve the goal of elevating the lake level by 10 feet, he said.