Owen Sound is getting 30 million dollars to expand and upgrade its wastewater treatment plant.
Approval letters have been received from the federal and provincial governments for the project.
They are each kicking in 15 million dollars toward a project that’s expected to cost 45 million and allow for full secondary treatment of the city’s wastewater by 2018.
As of now, Owen Sound is only capable of primary treatment.
Secondary treatment will provide another level of filtration and disinfection of wastewater before it is discharged into the bay.
It will also provide for more volume capacity at the plant, which will reduce the chances of the overflow of untreated wastewater into the bay — something that frequently happens now whenever there is a heavy rainfall.
Councillor Bill Twaddle is the chair of the city’s operations advisory committee.
He says the letters of approval from the upper levels of government mean that any work the City does now toward the expansion and upgrades of the treatment plant is eligible for two-thirds funding.
An example is a 400 thousand dollar test project the city will embark on this fall.
Two companies will install special filters at the plant, each of which provides secondary treatment of the wastewater in a different way.
The results of this test project will help determine the model of the future expansion and upgrades.
The planned upgrades have been scaled back from a total cost of more than 60 million dollars because the federal and provincial governments would not increase their contributions.
If Owen Sound were to go ahead with everything in the original plans, the city would be on the hook for all of the additional costs.
The idea now is to do all of the necessary work to facilitate minimum secondary-level treatment, but allow for further expansion of the plant in the future should additional infrastructure money become available.
As the test filters are put into place, work continues on the environmental assessment which will lead to the design phase of the expansion and upgrades in 2012.
The federal and provincial governments have imposed a deadline of September 2018 to complete the project for which funding has been made available.
Twaddle says the hope is that the work will be done well in advance of that deadline.
