DuPage County is set to embark on its most expensive public works projects in the last 25 years, and one of its largest overall in that time.
The county board recently committed $21 million to revamp the electrical systems for two of the three county wastewater treatment plants, in Burr Ridge and Woodridge. The latter serves parts of Naperville.
But residents shouldn’t detect any changes in their day-to-day lives — and that’s the point.
“You would not notice until it failed, which is really true about much of what we do in public works,” said Mary FitzGerald Ozog, a DuPage County Board member from Glen Ellyn and chairwoman of the Public Works Committee. “You don’t notice good roads, but you sure notice bad roads, right?”
Ozog said the nearly 40-year-old electrical systems can no longer be fixed on a piecemeal basis, in part because the technology is so old that a lot of the parts aren’t being made anymore. The project is part of the county’s 20-year master plan and is mostly being funded by loans from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. It should lead to energy savings, Ozog said.
“The other thing, at least from my experience with this kind of thing, is that once you get something like this updated, a lot of times you don’t get to update it again for another several decades,” she said. “So it’ll be important to get this done right.”
The county contracted with Aldridge Electric of Libertyville for the three-year project, which is expected to begin this summer at the Greene Valley Wastewater Facility in Woodridge and the Knollwood Wastewater Facility in Burr Ridge. The plants clean about 22 million gallons of sewage per day before depositing it in local rivers.
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The county’s third sewage treatment plant, Nordic Wastewater Facility in Itasca, is currently being rebuilt to the tune of $10 million.
Giles Bruce is a freelance reporter for the Naperville Sun.