Service Authority outlines $23.7 million plan to decommission Oakland Park plant, proposes reclaimed-water lines for industry

The King George County Service Authority on Tuesday presented a preliminary engineering plan to decommission the aging Oakland Park wastewater treatment plant and move its sewage flow to the Hop Yard facility, a change officials say would reduce long-term operating costs and create capacity to serve new industrial customers.

"This is taking a smaller and deteriorating, outdated wastewater treatment plant facility, and basically transferring the sewage that is processed there to the Hop Yard plant," Dan Hamilton, speaking for the service authority, told the board. He said the Hop Yard plant is currently permitted to process up to 375,000 gallons per day and could be modified for higher flows.

Hamilton said the engineering estimate for the broader project — which included a 17,000-foot, 6-inch PVC wastewater force main from Oakland Park to Hop Yard, a potential 17,000-foot 12-inch water main interconnection for redundancy, and an optional reclaimed-water distribution system for industrial cooling — was about $23.7 million. He told the board that roughly $13.5 million of that estimate would be for reclaimed-water piping that a developer could fund, and that the authoritywould therefore face a smaller net cost to decommission Oakland Park.

"If you take out the reclaimed-water portion and the water-main upgrade we estimated, you're more down around $5.3 million to decommission the Oakland Park wastewater plant," Hamilton said. He added that the reclaimed-water system would be funded by any developer that wanted recycled water for cooling, and "would not be something we're talking about doing this year or next year; this is probably 2, 3, 4, 5 years down the road."

Hamilton explained system benefits if the authority pursues the change: fewer treatment plants to staff (from five down to three after other adjustments), lower operating and chemical costs, and potential combined-permit efficiencies that could reduce monitoring obligations.

He sketched the reclaimed-water concept as a potential asset for large users such as data centers: "They can use that as cooling water instead of taking resources from the ground," he said, and noted that any such infrastructure would be financed by the project developer so that current ratepayers would not be responsible.

Board members discussed cost shares, previous ARPA funding decisions and whether past projects should have been included in prior funding rounds. Hamilton said he would research why earlier interconnections were not covered by ARPA funds and return with that history. He also noted operational context from recent storms and that the plant at Oakland Park was built in 1993 and has reached its expected useful life.

What happens next: Hamilton said the full 33-page preliminary engineering report is public and staff will bring further analysis and options back to the board as developers or funding opportunities materialize. No formal vote to decommission was taken Tuesday; the presentation was accepted for further consideration.

Costs and timeline: Hamilton cited the $23.7 million estimate as a multi-year planning figure and described a roughly 12-year operating-cost payback if the authority or county financed the decommissioning and realized the annual savings Hamilton estimated ($400,000 per year in operating-cost reductions based on older estimates). Hamilton cautioned that the estimates are dated and would be refined in later engineering and procurement steps.

The authority also reported two surplus parcels for sealed-bid sale with bids due Feb. 10 and said those sales would be processed publicly.