New Plans for Sewage Plant October 20, 2006 Sewer district plans new treatment plant BY CHARLES F. TRENTELMAN Standard-Examiner staff ctrentelman@standard.net MARRIOTT-SLATERVILLE More people than ever are flushing toilets and dumping stuff down drains in Weber County, and the added cost of treating that sewage is about to come due. The population of Weber County has gone up 7.2 percent, from 196,533 to 210,749, between 2000 and 2005 after rising 24 percent from 1990 to 2000. Pressure from growth, coupled with a 50-year-old plant and stringent new environmental rules, has the Central Weber Sewer Improvement District starting what it thinks "will be a $117 million expansion of its treatment plant on Pioneer Road. When that cost will filter down to the taxpayers and how much it will mean to the monthly utility bill is not yet known. Standard-Examiner Lance Wood, director of the Central Weber Sewer Improvement District, said the district is funded by a combination of taxes, user fees and impact fees, and he expects all three will have to be tapped to pay for the expansion. The plan is to build a parallel plant next to the existing one at 2618 W. Pioneer Road, Marriott-Slaterville. The work is in the initial design stage, with completion expected in about four years. Weber is not the only sewage treatment plant facing growth pangs. The North Davis Sewage District is finishing up a six-year expansion project, spending around $100 million to expand its plant and add significant new pipelines to serve it. It has managed to shield customers from higher taxes because of the expansion work, so far, but the plant Director Kevin Cowan said Thursday that higher user fees are on the horizon there as well. Wood said three separate forces are driving the need to expand Weber's plant: The changing requirements of the Environmental Protection Agency for the quality of the water that the plant lets into the Weber River: those requirements mean the plant has to change the way it has been treating water for the last 50 years. The existing plant is 50 years old. It was built on Pioneer Road because that is where the main sewer line from Ogden, built in 1909, runs. That pipe used to dump directly into the Great Salt Lake. When the plant was completed in 1959 it diverted the sewage and treated it before sending it west to the lake. The population of Weber County continues to grow. The plant currently serves 169,000 people in 11 cities and parts of four others. New homes, subdivisions and cities are hooking up daily. Hooper will eventually hook its sewer system into the Central Weber treatment plant. "Even without the growth we're faced with changing requirements and an aging plant," Wood said. One critical point of the new plant will be that it uses a new treatment method. Currently, sewage goes through filters to take out solids, then goes into a "trickling filter" system, 12 large tanks full of rocks where bacteria treat the sewage.