The price of the proposed water treatment plant Lorain wants to build to free up lakefront property for possible redevelopment has gone up by tens of millions of dollars in just a few years. But the price that residents will pay for water and sewer should only go up by pennies, and that won’t take place until 2024.
Those were the major takeaways from Lorain Utilities Director Joseph A. Carbonaro’s annual utilities department update presented Nov. 14 during the city council streets and utilities committee meeting.
The city has been toying with the idea of building a new water treatment plant to replace the old one located at 100 Alabama Ave. for years.
As recently as 2019 estimates for such a project to be built at the former site of the Ohio Edison power plant at the southwest corner of West Erie and Oberlin avenues were $50 million. The power plant was demolished in 2011.
But now that price has gone to $80 million. Carbonaro blamed the jump in price to the increased cost of materials and inflation
Earlier this year it was learned that it would cost $5.5 million to remove “below grade structures from the power plant” that were left in place when it was demolished. Engineers said it would not be wise to build over that underground infrastructure.
Furthermore, Councilwoman at-large Mary Springowski wondered if moving the plant to the land on West Erie and Oberlin would leave the plant still too close to the lakefront, thus causing it to be a continued hindrance to lakefront development.
With all the uncertainty hanging over the original location, the city hired HDR Inc. out of Cleveland to complete an Alternative Site Feasibility Assessment.
Based on the city’s request, HDR looked at the pros and cons of building the facility at three alternative locations as well as the former power plant site. The three alternative sites were the Kings Woods area, which is 1.25 miles southwest of the current treatment plant; a site near the Phillip Q. Maiorana wastewater treatment plant, which is 4.25 miles west of the current plant; and an area adjacent to and across the street from the former power plant site, which the study referred to as Park and Parcel Near Baseline Location, an area currently occupied by a parking lot and Settlers’ Watch Park.
Building at that Park and Parcel Near Baseline Location would cost just under $80 million — the least expensive of the four sites — but that figure is “back of the napkin” and has not been fully priced out, Carbonaro told committee members.
Carbonaro, in an interview on Nov. 15 told The Morning Journal, that when the city began plans to build a tunnel to help with stormwater retention, the original cost of the project was $30 million to $35 million and the final cost came in at $70 million.
“Due to the length of time of the project, the price considerably increased,” Carbonaro said.
The unspoken message: The city better do something quickly if they don’t want to spend upwards of $100 million for a new water purification plant.
Building on the originally planned site would run approximately $80 million. But that would include the removal of underground infrastructure at a cost of $5.5 million that the city wouldn’t have to pay for if it built the project slightly further east.
Building at the PQM site would cost the city an additional $38 to $42 million while building in the Kings Woods area would increase the cost by $11 million.
Carbonaro said ultimately he would choose what he described as a “hybrid” of the original plan, which would move the facility slightly to the east of the originally planned site.
“We’d lose the little parking lot there, but we could save the park (Settlers’ Watch),” he said.
The 22-page feasibility study was dated Sept. 27, 2022.
“Five factors were evaluated and will be expanded upon herein: community impacts, environmental issues, hydraulics, accessibility, and capital costs,” the authors of the study wrote.
The study noted that building the plant in the Kings Woods area would cause a huge community impact. They noted the plant would have to be designed to “integrate” with the neighborhood.
“Furthermore, construction noise and traffic could cause disturbances among the surrounding (area) possibly leading to complaints from residents,” the study noted. The area is also made up almost exclusively of wetlands, which would have to be mitigated.
After construction, the constant flow of truck traffic in and out of a plant at Kings Woods would also be problematic, the authors noted.
“After implementation of the new (plant), trucks carrying necessary chemicals and equipment, and removing residuals, would still have to regularly travel through the subdivisions to reach the (plant). Of course, the facility would have to carefully manage noise due to its proximity to residences.”
The PQM plant would likely be too expensive. A $35 million raw-water pump station would have to be built to pump the water from the lake to the plant, the study notes.
The prices are only expected to climb, Carbonaro said, should the city continue to kick the project down the road.
The city should take a hard look at starting the project as soon as it can because it’s only going to get more expensive, Safety Service Director Sanford Washington said.
“Somebody needs to really take this and run with this and say we’ve got to do this now. You see the costs going up. You wait another year or two, it’ll be up to $100 million,” Washington said.
Good news on rates
Carbonaro said sewer and water rates for city residents aren’t expected to increase in 2023. He anticipated the rates for sewer would increase by 1 percent or approximately 6 cents, from the current cost of $6.48 to $6.54 starting in 2024.
“It’s a preliminary proposal. The rates would be raised on the consumption and it would be minimal raises over a longer period of time,” Carbonaro said.
Mayor Jack Bradley was pleased to hear that. When he took over as mayor in 2020 one of the first things he did was lower sewer and water rates to what they had been in 2017. The biggest of those was returning what are known as “fixed rates” to $9. Had he not, residents in Lorain would have been paying between $20 to $25 in “fixed rates” a month.
Bradley lowered the rates after looking at data that city officials used in 2017 to raise rates.
“I didn’t feel the data being used was accurate. I took it upon myself to lower the water rates to what they had been in 2017 and then I told the council to lower the wastewater rates to what they had been in 2017,” Bradley said.
“It looks like that was a good move because we haven’t had to raise rates and we’ve remained solvent,” Bradley said.
