Othello secures $400K for water plant design

OTHELLO — The city of Othello announced during Monday’s regular City Council meeting that the city had secured $400,000 in additional funding from the 2024 legislative session to go toward the design of a water treatment plant.

Mayor Shawn Logan explained the basics of the project. 

“One of the things that the city has been working on for quite a number of years. It went back longer than I thought, at least the last eight or nine years … the city of Othello made significant investments to reduce its dependency on the use of groundwater,” Logan said. “We want to improve our current water infrastructure and facilities and assess alternative sources that would provide reliable long-term water supply to the community.”

The alternative source would come in the form of the water treatment plant. 

“In 2019, the city of Othello received a grant through the Office of Columbia River to complete an Aquifer Storage and Recovery feasibility study and testing program,” Logan said. “After several years of data collection, the ASR method has proven to be effective, and the city is prepared to build out a permanent solution that will result in a sustainable, reliable, environmentally responsible water supply plan for the Othello region that will serve residents, food processors, agriculture and the Columbia River Basin for generations to come.”

Logan elaborated on the motivation behind the project. 

“Right now we're 100% reliant on a rapidly depleting groundwater supply,” he said. “We wanted to ensure our community has access to reliable clean water. We wanted to provide for economic vitality, as we're a home to regional ag processors. We wanted to mitigate environmental disparities and we wanted to become resilient to drought.”

The estimate for the cost of the design phase is about $1.4 million, Logan said. 

“We received last year a capital budget appropriation from the state legislature in the amount of 400,000 for the pre-design of a water treatment plant,” he said. “The pre-design, we're under contract to have that work done; that work on the pre-design is due to be completed by the end of this year.”

According to the meeting’s agenda packet, the construction phase of the treatment plant is projected to cost $14 million.

“At the last city council meeting a week ago, I announced that we would find out whether we had received an additional $400,000 In this year's capital budget and we did. We received an additional $400,000 towards the design of a water treatment plant. So there's a pre-design phase, which is more of information gathering, to gather all the data needed to create a design.”

Logan said the city has also put in a new legislative request for $950,000 toward the design phase of the project. 

“We were met with enthusiastic support,” he said. “We'll find out about that request a little bit later this summer.”

Logan then talked about the need for somewhere to build the treatment plant.

“In order to complete this project with a water treatment plant, we are going to have to acquire property,” he said. “I've had conversations with council, we're still in the process of trying to acquire property, and we're going to need to build a $14 million water treatment plant.”

The funding is not limited to what is coming from legislative appropriations.

“There are additional places that we can seek funds; through CERB depending on our project, and whatever other public or private partnerships we want to create. The Public Works Board is another place that we could potentially receive funding and grant funding from, and the Washington State Department of Health and potentially the Office of Columbia River,” Logan said. “So we’re working on a lot of funding areas; this is going to probably be a number of them. The city is eventually going to have to make some investments in this too, but by and large most of this study and development of this project has been paid for by grants.”

According to the city’s summary of the long-term water supply plan, the schedule for the project says construction would begin in 2026 and the initial operation of the new plant would begin in late 2027. 

Gabriel Davis may be reached at gdavis@columbiabasinherald.com.

    One of Othello’s water towers, located on 14th Avenue. Monday’s Othello City Council meeting featured an update on the city’s plan to move away from the city’s dependence on depleting groundwater.