GREENFIELD — After some delay, the city is moving forward with construction of a new wastewater treatment plant.
The excavation portion of the project went out for bid at the most recent meeting of the Greenfield Board of Works. The board will likely open bids at its next meeting, on Aug. 10, and wastewater utility manager Nick Dezelan hopes that the dirt will start moving by mid-September.
That portion of the work will take three to four months, after which the city will re-survey the site and begin the bidding phase for the construction portion of the project. Dezelan estimated that construction will be underway by March or April 2022.
The new treatment plant will be located on the city’s property on South State Street and will double water processing capacity from 4 million to 8 million gallons per day. It also will allow Greenfield to adequately comply with Indiana Department of Environmental Management regulations.
It will also include newer waste-processing technology; a new laboratory; and new administrative space, allowing all wastewater employees to operate out of the same building for the first time.
The city had initially planned to start the project in April of this year. However, issues they ran into with the planned site of the project caused a delay.
“It was the old city dump, so it’s just construction and urban debris,” Dezelan said. “The investigation into the site conditions took longer than originally thought, because we didn’t know we were going to dig through 20 feet of trash to build the treatment plant.”
For its plans, the city had to get approval from IDEM. Dezelan said the department was pleased that Greenfield was cleaning up a former dump site as part of its construction process.
“What better thing to put on an old dump than a wastewater treatment plant?” he said. “It’s not an ideal place for a park or a residential development. It was just going to be vacant land, so it’ll be good for us to get cleaned up.”
The city currently does not have an estimate on the full cost of the project, due to fluctuations on the price of steel, concrete and other construction materials related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The plant was originally estimated to cost about $39 million.
The city council has approved issuing bonds for up to $42.5 million to pay for the construction; those will not be issued until bids are finalized. The bonds are backed by a rate increase for Greenfield Utility customers, the third step of which will go into effect in January 2022. Across the three steps, customers’ utility rates will have nearly doubled.
Greenfield Mayor Chuck Fewell said it’s hard to know how much the final cost of the treatment plan will be, but that it is an important investment as the community continues to grow. According to the city’s QuickFacts page at www.census.gov, the city’s population was an estimated 23,006 in 2019, up 11.5% since 2010.
“We need this desperately because of the number of large facilities that are still looking at us (as a possible location) and the housing additions that are still looking at us,” Fewell said.
The next step in Fewell’s planned improvements to government buildings will be a new headquarters for the street department, which is planned to occupy the same plot of land where the new Animal Management building is currently under construction on South Franklin Street.
Fewell said he would ideally like to begin the design process for that building in late 2021 and start construction next year.
The wastewater treatment plant will also serve the new Hancock County Jail, although it is outside the city limits, as well as potentially other developments on a parcel of land outside the city limits the city has acquired. Customers outside the city limits will pay a higher utility rate.
The new plant will be constructed on the same parcel as the current facility on the south side of the city and will have a greater capacity to be upgraded in the future should the city continue to grow
Dezelan said the department’s employees are excited to have a new and better building to work out of.
“They take their work very seriously, and they want to make sure the creek’s clean and healthy and safe for everyone to play in or around,” he said.