“Commitment” was a word used often May 28 as Assistant City Manager Sandra Woodbury attempted to convince the Milton City Council to set aside $24 million in reserves as dedicated funding for construction of a wastewater treatment plant.
Woodbury, along with City Manager Ed Spears, was letting the city’s governing board know as gently, if firmly, as she could that the time had come to commit to construction of a new sewer plant and associated spray field project.
Not doing so, Woodbury said, could cost the city grant awards it had received as well as future opportunities. Most urgent, she said, was a $16.9 million Resilient Florida Grant she is trying to convince the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to let the city keep.
Woodbury said she had confidence that if the city were willing to commit to setting aside the reserves as a 50/50 match, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which administers the grant, would be willing to commit to join with the city in covering the cost of putting in the concrete for the new plant.
“What stresses me right now is losing the $16.9 million,” she said. “I believe I can get them to agree to put the concrete in. But the longer this decision takes to make, the greater the chances that you lose these fundings.”
She said DEP has agreed not to pull the existing grant application, but insisted that Milton officials provide a scope of work in order to receive the award.
“I’m proud to announce that they are really trying to work with us,” she said.
Council members voted unanimously to set the huge chunk of its reserve fund aside as collateral. The city retained the 4.5 months of reserves it is required by the state to have on hand.
The cost of concreting the plant site, Woodbury said, would be $32 million if the city builds a plant capable of processing three million gallons of wastewater each day and $41 million if it chooses to build the plant to four million gallons per day capacity.
Spears assured the council that the $24 million, set aside for plant project construction and an associated disposal area, would not be removed from city coffers and will continue to draw interest.
“That money’s not going anywhere,” he said.
It will be used as needed when Phase 1 construction of the plant gets underway. Woodbury said that any qualifying new grants received prior to the concrete work being done can be put toward the resilience grant match instead of the reserve funds set aside.
At the special called meeting of the City Council, board members learned that the overall cost of a new plant has been estimated at $66.8 million if it builds to the three million gallons per day standard and $88.1 million for the larger, four-million per day capacity.
Spray fields constructed as a ground source for depositing treated wastewater and to end the dumping of the wastewater, called effluent, into the Blackwater River will run $34.4 million for a three million gallon capacity plant and $44 million for the larger facility.
Total cost is estimated at $117.9 million for a fully operational three million gallon per day wastewater treatment plant and spray field network and $144.8 if the city opts for a four million gallon per day plant and spray field network.
“The bottom line is it’s a big figure, the bottom line is there’s more funding out there and the bottom line is this is a doable project,” Woodbury told council members. “It’s a doable project but it’s going to take everybody, and commitment.”
Other than voting to pay $56,000 to cover the cost of relocating nine gopher tortoises found on the site of one of its spray field parcels, the council took no other action at the May 28 meeting. It appears inevitable, however, that a sanitation fee increase of $5 a month for residential properties and $20 a month for commercial properties will be discussed at future meetings.
Residential customers presently pay $23.16 a month inside the city limits and $28.69 in the service area outside the city limits.
Board members were given a breakdown of what progress is being made on all fronts of the wastewater treatment plant project.
Spears had raised concerns that the council might reconsider or attempt to tweak design plans for the treatment plant and spray fields project after Dave Samples, the president of the group Save Our Blackwater, raised concerns over the possibility of dangerous erosion at one of the spray field sites.
He warned the council that further delays to the project, already delayed by a December 2024 vote to re-site the new treatment plant due to environmental concerns, would cost millions and likely end the possibility of the city receiving grant dollars pulled back due to previous construction delays.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Milton freezes $24 million in reserves, all in on wastewater treatment
Reporting by Tom McLaughlin, Pensacola News Journal / Pensacola News Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
