After a year and a half of study, the Lake Forest City Council approved a project at the city water plant that will take about two years and could cost close to $10 million.
On Feb. 1, the City Council approved a bid of $3,368,273 by General Electric Water and Process Technologies to supply new water filters for the next 20 years. The council also approved $563,000 to Strand Associates to design how to retrofit the plant for the new filters.
The project has its roots in a May 2014 letter the city got from a filter manufacturer in France named Aquasource. The letter said Aquasource would no longer manufacture the 18-inch diameter water filters it had supplied to Lake Forest since April 2004, said Michael Thomas, Lake Forest’s director of public works.
“They were the only ones with 18-inch filters,” Thomas said. “Today the standard is 10-inch.”
The Lake Forest Public Works Committee considered various options – including getting out of the water business entirely, buying water from someone else and finding a private contractor to run the water plant. On Feb. 1, when the city council approved a filter supplier and designer, Thomas said he was happy.
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“If I could have given the guys in the front row a high-five, I would have,” he said.
The city plans to go out to bid early in 2017 for a contractor to retrofit the water plant, Thomas said. That contractor will have to replace the 192 18-inch filters with 864 of the 10-inch filters.
The 10-inch filters have the advantage of being able to filter the same amount of water when it is cold as when it’s not, Thomas said. With the 18-inch filters, the plant’s capacity was reduced when Lake Michigan was cold, he said.
The project will require shutting down half the plant, he said, and to avoid impact on water users, construction will take place over the next two winters with half the plant closed each winter. Completion is anticipated by spring 2019, he said.
“To change these out, we don’t want to do it when we have high demands for water,” Thomas said.
The city estimates the entire project will cost $9,750,000. The city will use savings to pay for the design process and then, in 2018, plans to sell $9.3 million in bonds to fund construction, said Elizabeth Holleb, director of finance. The $9.3 million would be paid off over 20 years.
Holleb said the City Council will likely consider water rates at a November 2016 capital budget workshop. Rates connected to the water plant project are not projected to increase until at least May 2018, if then, she said.
Holleb said the city will have paid off a different bond issue in a few years and the upcoming bond issue for the water plant would take its place.
“We think the impact will be minimal,” Holleb said.
The water plant was privately built in 1891 and purchased by the city in 1921, Thomas said.
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