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Council approves emergency SCADA/PLC upgrade at wastewater plant after repeated equipment failures
Summary
After multiple recent SCADA/PLC failures and six service call-ins in a single week, council approved use of reserves to upgrade the wastewater plant's SCADA and PLC systems; staff said replacement was planned for early 2026 but failures accelerated the schedule.
City staff reported persistent SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) and PLC (programmable logic controller) failures at the wastewater treatment plant and asked the council to approve payment to replace the failing equipment now rather than in the originally planned 2026 timeline.
Staff (Matt) told the council the city had saved $150,000 in 2024 and $150,000 in 2025 toward a planned SCADA/PLC project, but “we are three months short” and have had multiple recent failures. Matt said the plant experienced a surge in failures over the past three to four months and that staff recorded six call-ins in one week because equipment was not collecting or sending signals as intended.
Council members asked whether the issues were hardware or software, whether patches or scheduled maintenance could have prevented rapid failure, and what vendors were used. Staff said the electronic/hardware side was failing: the system had components dating to the plant’s original 2009 installation, vendors Egan (SCADA contractor) and CTS (IT) assist with upgrades, some minor SCADA improvements were made in 2020, and the planned full replacement was scheduled for early 2026. Because recent failures accelerated the need, staff requested council approval to use approximately $177,000 for immediate replacement; the transcript records that amount as “$177,58” (amount not fully specified in the audio transcript) and staff said the funds would be drawn from the fund balance previously set aside.
Council approved the payment for the SCADA/PLC upgrades by voice vote (motion seconded by Maggie Bass) with a recorded outcome of 5-0.
Why it matters: SCADA and PLC systems are the operational control systems for the wastewater plant; failures affect automated monitoring and control and have led to multiple staff call-ins for manual interventions. Replacing or upgrading these systems restores reliable automated control and reduces the risk of operational interruptions.
What’s next: Staff will proceed with the vendor work and charge the upgrade to the wastewater-fund reserves; larger capital items noted for 2027–2028 (a multi-million-dollar filter project) remain on the horizon and were not affected by this immediate action.
