The State Road 207 Water Reclamation Facility was approved at a total not-to-exceed amount of $191,820,000, and that figure includes a contingency of $6,230,000. The Board of County Commissioners awarded the design-build agreement to Jacobs Project Management Co. at its regular meeting of Dec. 19, 2023, as Phase 2 of the project. Phase 1 had been authorized on Sept. 6, 2022, when the board let the County Administrator execute an agreement with the same firm for a not-to-exceed $30,000,000. That is the mechanism before the money: a progressive design-build contract, which is one firm doing both the design and the construction with the price settled in stages rather than bid off a finished set of drawings.

This paper reported the plant on Oct. 16, and said then that none of the county documents read for that story broke out how the $191.8 million was paid for. The release the county published the day after the award does break it out, and it does so in two sentences that sit next to each other near the foot of the document. They read: “The project is funded primarily through Utility bond proceeds. This will not affect customer rates.”

That release gives no bond amount, no bond term, no issue date and no breakdown of which share of the cost came from borrowing and which from rates.

The schedule in the 2023 release

The same release also gives a schedule. The schedule held. It says the project stood at that point in Phase 1 with 62 percent completion, and that the entire project was scheduled to be completed in May 2026. The plant came online on May 11, 2026, which is inside the month the county had named for it roughly thirty months earlier, and the county’s own release of June 23 gives that date as the day the facility officially came online.

The pipeline figure in that same account has moved since 2023. The December 2023 release describes the project as including a 13-mile pipeline network for maximising delivery of reclaimed water to residential irrigation. The releases of June 23, 2026 and Oct. 27, 2026 both give approximately 15 miles, and the June one adds that the mains run 16 inches to 30 inches.

The deadline, and the figure that is new

The reason the state is pushing sits in the 2023 release, which names Senate Bill 64. That law requires a statewide elimination of non-beneficial surface water discharges of effluent, which means treated sewage put into a river instead of reused, and the release gives the implementation deadline as 2032. In 2023 the county said it recycled 56 percent of all its wastewater treatment flows for beneficial purposes to replace the use of traditional freshwater supplies, and it has published no updated share since the plant opened.

One figure is new this month. The Oct. 27 release carries a subheading saying the project is expected to conserve 13 billion gallons of water over 20 years while protecting local waterways. That figure is in neither the June 2026 release nor the December 2023 one, and the county has published no calculation, no method and no annual rate behind it.

The concurrency question on a treatment plant is how much of the capacity is already committed, and the county has still not published an answer to it. The plant treats 3.25 million gallons a day and is built to be taken to 6.5 million, and no document read for this story says where inside that range it is running now. The Board of County Commissioners meets next on Tuesday, Nov. 3 at 9 a.m., in the county auditorium at 500 San Sebastian View.