The State Road 207 Water Reclamation Facility treats 3.25 million gallons of wastewater a day and is built to be expanded to 6.5 million. The county cut the ribbon on it Thursday morning, five months after it started running on May 11. The county’s own subheading on the announcement reads, word for word, “$191.8 million project is the largest capital improvement project in County history.”

A water reclamation facility treats sewage and sends part of it back out as reclaimed water, which is the non-drinking water used for irrigation. The point of building one is that every gallon of lawn watered with reclaimed water is a gallon not drawn out of the drinking water supply.

What the plant is and where it is

The facility sits at 3055 State Road 207 in Elkton, on the farm side of the county. The project also included multiple pump stations and what the county describes as approximately 15 miles of wastewater and reclaimed water pipelines tying the plant into the rest of the utility system.

Jacobs delivered it under a progressive design-build contract, which is an arrangement where the county hires one firm to both design and build the thing and the price is settled in stages as the design firms up, rather than bid as a finished set of drawings.

Over the next 20 years the county expects the project to keep more than one million pounds of nutrient pollutants, nitrogen and phosphorus among them, out of the Matanzas River. That estimate is the county’s and it is hedged in the county’s own words as more than. It appears twice in writing, in Thursday’s announcement and in the news item the county published in March about its 2025 utilities annual report, before the plant opened.

The number the documents do not carry

Capacity in gallons per day is the number this plant will be argued over, because on a utility system it does the same work a classroom seat does on a school and a lane does on a road. It sets how many connections the system can take.

The county published the two ends of the range. It did not publish where inside that range the plant is now running, and none of the three county documents read for this story carries a figure for how much of the 3.25 million gallons a day is in use or already committed to approved development. None gives a trigger or a date for the expansion to 6.5 million.

None of them breaks out how the $191.8 million was paid for. The utilities department is an enterprise fund, which means it runs on what it charges rather than on the general property tax levy, and the county says the average monthly residential bill is approximately 10 percent below the regional average. Which share of the plant came from rates, which from the fees charged on new connections and which from borrowing is not in the material the county put out.

It opened into a water shortage order

The utility department’s own front page carried an announcement early Friday headed “Drought Conditions Persist Across St. Johns County Despite Recent Rainfall.” It says the St. Johns River Water Management District’s Phase III Extreme Water Shortage Order remains in effect, and that at the end of July the county’s rainfall was approximately 8.3 inches below its 12-month average.

That is not a contradiction. It is the reason to build one. Reclaimed water for irrigation is the thing a county builds when drinking water is the constraint, and the county says so in the same sentence it gives the capacity in.