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650 N. First Street
PO Box 96 Woodburn, OR 97071 Phone:
503.981.3441 |
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| City begins to study second phase of wastewater plant |
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 | | Photo By John Gervais | | Curtis Stultz (in orange shirt), assistant superintendent of the facility, gives a tour made up of Woodburn citizen members of the Wastewater Facility Plan Advisory Committee. |
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By John Gervais
The Woodburn Waste Water Treatment Facility is designed to handle the waste of 30,000 people at a cost of $38.3 million. The facility opened in 2001 and is rapidly approaching the need for a second phase, due to Woodburn's rapid growth in population.
With an expansion just a couple of years off, the Woodburn Public Works Department has initiated a citizen advisory committee.
This committee is in the beginnings stages of reviewing the present facility and has opened discussions to lay the groundwork for future meetings and design work for an expansion onto an additional 88 acres the city has purchased adjacent to the present site.
The public works department asked for citizen volunteers to join staff and designers in planning this project, according to Randy Rohman, project manager for the city's public works department.
On April 24 Heidi Bishoff, Scott Eden (from Marion County), Jerry Brown, Willis Grafe, Barbara Lucas, Dennis Want, John Geinhardt and Rongie Wangerin joined local staff to begin the review to build a new facility for Woodburn's future.
Following a tour of the existing facility, and a discussion of its functions from one end to the other, committee members got down to the business of making sure that Woodburn will be ready for the next decade of populationgrowth and the ever-tightening rules on water quality from the state and federal governments.
With the present waste water treatment plant poplar tree farm, the city has been able to avoid putting any treated water back into the Pudding River. While the river may not be an option, using water from the treatment plant for other irrigation applications is a real possibility and could be very helpful in extending the effective life of the two-part plant.
There is no estimate on what Phase II will cost the City of Woodburn; however, rising into the $20 to 30 million range is not out of the question.
Protecting fish in the Pudding River will be a top consideration.
Depending on the temperature, the water could be harmful to the fish. Rainbow trout, for example, like 55 to 60 degree temperature; however, a shallow and/or slow moving river at the valley level may have water a lot hotter than 55 degrees.
Rohman said that Phase I of the Woodburn plant was paid for with the utilization of a revolving loan from the Department of Environmental Quality and the upcoming phase will likely depend on a revolving loan to be paid for by rate payers.
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