ST PETER — St. Peter residents might see their water bills increase by $120 to $180 a year, but their water will be clean, will taste uniformly good across the city, will be softer, and there will be plenty of it.

That’s the promise of a new $16.8 million drinking water improvement plan that was finalized by the City Council this week. It involves wells, a new treatment plant and an improved filtration system for the existing plant on St. Julien Street.

An additional $1 million will be spent for a new water main and related improvements on Broadway Avenue, where the new plant will be built.

While expensive, the new system should leave the city in a strong position to meet a growing demand for water well into the future and also to deal with increasingly stringent government standards for water quality, said Public Works Director Lew Giesking. Doing it properly now makes it likely the city won’t need to make major improvements until well after debt for constructing the new water system is paid off two decades from now.

“What we’re building and investing in is going to have value to us over the life of the bond — 20 years — and likely beyond that,” Giesking said.

Old wells, new demand
The project also will allow the city to seal up wells at its Jefferson Street treatment plant, which each tap into three different aquifers at different depths. Those types of wells are frowned upon by state water regulators because they can allow contaminants to move from one aquifer to another.

“It’s a mandate that we had to close the multi-aquifer wells,” said Councilman John Kvamme. “And that’s the pebble that came down the hill and caused the avalanche.”

Giesking said concern about those wells by state officials was one factor, but the city has known for years that its system wasn’t going to keep up with growing water use. Already, demand has exceeded capacity on some days — forcing the city to draw down its water tanks during the day, even with all wells in use and the treatment plant working at top capacity.

So far, those tanks have been replenished at night, Giesking said. But a well failure, equipment breakdowns or a major fire could force the city to institute water-use restrictions.

“We’re really dependent on everything operating,” he said.

Public works officials have known for more than a decade that the aging Jefferson Street facility needed to be replaced, but crews have managed to keep it running even as it exceeded its life expectancy by 15 years.

“They’ve done an outstanding job of keeping that plant operational,” Giesking said.

Rising costs
The City Council, facing a low bid that was well above the $14.1 million estimate, asked the department last month to start preparing to do an outstanding job of reducing anticipated operational costs at the new facility. Similar efforts have driven down costs at the city’s state-of-the-art wastewater treatment plant, opened in 2004.

With construction costs running higher than expected, reduced operational costs could help alleviate the boost in water bills for St. Peter residents and businesses. But bills are inevitably going to rise because of the project.

“It’s going to result in significant increases in local water rates,” Kvamme said.

Estimated hikes of $10 to $15 a month for residents have been talked about, but final numbers are still being tabulated. And crucial factors in determining those rates have changed since they were first used — one positive and one negative.

The negative change, of course, is the $2.7 million growth in the projected cost of the treatment plant to built on Broadway Avenue, improvements to the treatment plant on St. Julien Street and other related projects. The positive development is the way the project will be initially financed.

The city is eligible for a low-interest state loan to cover the entire construction cost, something that will result in a reduction of anticipated interest payments of $5 million to $6 million, Giesking said. There’s also potential that the size of that loan will fall.

That’s because St. Peter officials believe they have a good chance to receive about $2.8 million in federal economic stimulus funding for the project. Final word should come in August, Giesking said.

Softer, cleaner
Residents might see some savings in water-softening costs to offset the rise in water bills. The new plant and the St. Julien plant will use reverse osmosis water filtration that will reduce the level of chloride in the water, something that might become vital if state standards for chloride discharge into the Minnesota River are added in the future.

A byproduct of that filtration system is softer water, Giesking said.

Reverse osmosis process has detractors, though, because it produces a substantial amount of waste water — as much as 10 to 30 percent, Kvamme said.

“The reverse osmosis is controversial because a percentage of it is loss,” he said.

The council addressed that issue in part by adding a third filtration system to the plan that will filter the waste water from the reverse osmosis process, allowing a portion of it to be returned to the drinking water stream, Giesking said. Reverse osmosis also leaves the city best able to deal with unanticipated changes in drinking water standards imposed by state and federal governments.

And by adding reverse osmosis to the St. Julien Street plant, the city expects to avoid a contentious issue in the city two decades ago — complaints that one end of town received lower quality, and less tasty, water than the other.

The estimated completion date of the project is May or June 2011.