The Dalles City Council on June 23 accepted an annual operations report for the city’s wastewater treatment plant from Jacobs and authorized the city manager to sign amendment No. 2 to the plant operations contract with OMI, in an amount not to exceed $1,498,464.

The report, delivered by Oscar Ferris, plant manager for Jacobs/OMI, summarized plant staffing, permit compliance and recent equipment failures. Ferris said the plant remained “well below all of those limits and remain in compliance and provide high quality effluent, discharge to the Columbia River.” He also described a digester failure that required operating on a single secondary digester for a period and raised costs while repairs proceeded.

The council approved the contract amendment after staff said the OMI contract allows annual cost adjustments using a CPI-plus-2% formula capped at 4%; staff recommended the amendment for the third year of the 15-year contract because operating costs exceeded the typical CPI range. Councilor Tim McLaughlin moved to authorize the city manager to sign the amendment; Councilor Richardson seconded. The motion carried.

Ferris told the council Jacobs used regional subject-matter experts to address maintenance and operations, and that the contractor completed 1,766 work orders in the year, with 96 identified as preventive or predictive maintenance. He noted a recordable injury in 2023 — the first in roughly 20 years — but said the plant has since logged more than 700 days without a recordable incident.

Councilors pressed for technical detail on monitoring. Councilor Richardson asked about an E. coli graph; Ferris explained the chart highlights monthly single-sample peaks and that a single-sample permit limit of 406 parts per million applies to the spikes, not to the monthly geometric mean.

Ferris and Jacobs regional manager Jeff Houchin also described an ongoing renewable-energy study to evaluate biogas capture and potential generation to the electrical grid. “We are trying to analyze how much biogas we actually produce, what we can do to, capture that and use it beneficially,” Ferris said. Officials said equipment installed during a 2019 upgrade has not performed as hoped and the master plan update will further evaluate options.

Staff and council also discussed staffing challenges at the plant; Ferris said the facility has had difficulty filling a mechanic role for about eight months and that some candidates were not a good fit.

The amendment the council approved updates the contract cost for the coming year; staff said funds are available in the wastewater fund and included in the adopted FY25–26 budget.

Looking ahead, Jacobs and city staff said work from the renewable-energy study and the wastewater master-plan update will inform potential projects for methane/biogas capture and energy reuse. No additional policy action or funding beyond the approved amendment was adopted at the meeting.