State supports Quincy water treatment facility

QUINCY - Legislative support is looking good for a Quincy water treatment facility in a difficult budget session year.

The Senate and House budgets both came out this week with $4.5 million slated to construct a facility in Quincy, explained Pat Boss, public affairs consultant for the Port of Quincy.

"That water treatment facility was needed to help handle the additional capacity from all the new development going on in Quincy," Boss explained. "You've got a billion dollars worth of new development there in Quincy and all of these new developments, the data centers, etc., do require some use of water and then they also require some discharge of what they call cooling water, so we needed to have more water treatment infrastructure in Quincy to handle the cooling water the data centers in Quincy are going to be discharging."

The port sent letters out in hopes of garnering support to keep the money in the budget for this year.

"The original request was for $9 million, so we're obviously going to have to come back next year and get the rest of the funding, but it gives us a lot to work with in the interim," Boss said.

Language in the budget included the term "phase one," when the money was cut from the original request, Boss noted.

"Instead of getting the $9 million all in one chunk, we're going to try to get it in multiple chunks now," Boss said.

"We actually have got until 2012 to complete the whole thing," Quincy port commissioner Curt Morris said. "So $4.5 million is a great start, and I just want to say thank you to the state of Washington and the legislators for having the confidence in us to give us $4.5 million. That will go a long ways. It won't ultimately finish the project, but we may be able to have other things that come up between now and phase two."

A study funded by the City of Quincy and the port shows the facility is feasible, Morris noted.

"Ultimately it will help if we can get it to where we can finally use Lamb Weston's and Quincy Foods' discharge water," Morris said. "While we wouldn't send it necessarily back to them, we can use their water, treat it, filter it and use it for our data center cooling water.

The data centers could use each stream of the water two to five times, Morris noted.

"Now we're making very efficient use out of the water we have," he said. "What that does ultimately, it really increases Quincy's capacity without having to find new water."

That being said, Quincy is still looking for new water, Morris noted.

But the system, under the treatment water facility, would be a positive, Morris said.

"We would have one of the most sophisticated systems set up," he said. "Ultimately, this would be like phase two or phase three. We would pick up the municipal discharge water and use that for cooling water. We're not sending it back to the food processors, but we're using it for the cooling. And then you could turn around, anything that's coming back, use it for other things. I'm not exactly sure what at this point, but we could use it for a lot of different purposes."

Response has been positive from local and neighboring legislators, as well as those on the other side of the state.

"Puget Sound legislators are very supportive as well because they want to make sure Quincy has the necessary infrastructure to handle all of this new development," Boss said.

The state's revenue forecast took about $400 million out of the state's budget, he added.

"We were able to get extra money for Quincy despite the fact the state had to cut about $400 million from its budget," Boss said. "It's a very important victory for Grant County and for Quincy getting this money in a year the funding was so tight."

The City of Quincy will build the facility, but the port has been paying for the engineering studies and the upfront work.

"The reason for that is the city had more bonding capacity than the port did, so it was decided it would be better for the city to receive the money than the port," Boss said.

Boss said the budgets next go to a conference committee between the Senate and the House.

"Since we've got $4.5 million in both the Senate and the House, they should agree to keep (it) in there," he said. "After that the governor would approve or sign the budget into law, and then the money would be available effective July 1."

Work to excavate the ground and begin construction would start later in the year.

"It's been a very difficult budget session over here in Olympia," Boss said. "It's not been easy to get sources of funds, so we're very happy the Legislature was able to get some of this money over to Grant County to help us develop some of our infrastructure."

Highlighting area's water needs

According to the Port of Quincy's public affairs consultant, support for the water treatment facility is a separate issue than letters the port district sent out earlier in the month expressing concerns the recently signed Lake Roosevelt agreement does not provide water for Quincy.

Senate Bill 6874 and House Bill 3309 would create a Columbia River water delivery account to implement the Lake Roosevelt drawdown agreement Gov. Chris Gregoire recently signed with the Colville Tribe and the Spokane Tribe.

"They're not connected, but having said that, though, Quincy does need water," consultant Pat Boss said. "Really, the goal of those Lake Roosevelt letters was to highlight the fact Quincy needed some water and they would like to get some out of Lake Roosevelt if they could. If they can't, they would like to get the water from elsewhere."

There hasn't really been a response to the Lake Roosevelt letters, Boss said, as most of the Lake Roosevelt water has already been doled out.

"Quincy was mainly trying to highlight the fact they needed some water and they're trying to shine a light on that issue, because they do have a lot of growth right now," Boss said. "Very much like other communities in the Basin -Moses Lake, Quincy, Ephrata, Othello and Royal City all need new water. A lot of these areas are growing."