The city of De Soto, Kansas, is in the midst of a major expansion of its biological wastewater treatment facility to accommodate new industry coming to the region, including the massive $4 billion electric vehicle battery plant by Panasonic, which opened in July.
The Panasonic plant, one of Kansas’ largest economic development projects in decades, is expected to create between 4,000 and 8,000 jobs while helping meet surging demand for electric vehicle batteries.
Burns & McDonnell, working in a joint venture with CAS Constructors, is delivering the wastewater project through a progressive design-build (PDB) approach — the first time the city of De Soto has used this project delivery method.
“With the Panasonic facility coming to De Soto, the city recognized it needed to increase the capacity of both their waste plant and water plant,” said Ryan Rutkowski, Preconstruction Director with CAS Constructors. “Panasonic was in a position where some of the flows, the loading, and requirements of what they would be sending down the pipeline to the city’s existing waste plant, weren’t 100 percent determined.”
Therefore, the progressive design-build approach gave the city a lot of flexibility in bringing on a qualified team who had the ability to adapt as that information was coming down the line from Panasonic.
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Burns & McDonnell and CAS have been a joint venture team since 1994, working on 40-plus projects over the past 31 years.
“Having worked together on so many projects allowed our team to work in an integrated fashion on day one,” said Jeff Keller, Design Manager for Burns & McDonnell. “We already knew how to work together, so we could focus our energies on making sure we were collaborating with the city as well as the representatives from Panasonic as they learned more about their own project.”
Rutkowski added that thanks to their experience, the partners have the ability to weave and flex as changes come about.
Kansas state leaders, including Governor Laura Kelly and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, made the wastewater expansion a priority to ensure the infrastructure was in place ahead of the plant’s summer 2025 startup.
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“We started in the fall of 2023, and Panasonic needed to start sending flows to the waste plant by the summer of 2024,” Rutkowski said of the initial timeline, adding that Panasonic delays pushed it out until spring of 2025. “That was a very quick timeline, especially not knowing fully what was coming down the pipe or how much at the time.”
To meet Panasonic’s startup schedule, crews fast-tracked design and construction of a new influent pump station capable of handling the plant’s initial industrial flows. Electrical design work was also accelerated to account for long lead times on critical equipment.
“The way our team approached this was up-front we fully recognized that electrical gear was going to be one of the No. 1 drivers to hit that goal, for the pump station and all the other upgrades required,” Rutkowski said.
That meant construction needed to be delivered in phases to support the Panasonic facility’s initial build-out, which was divided into “2A” and “2B.”
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“2A included building out a pump station to be able to take flows from Panasonic and all of the electrical equipment for the balance of plant upgrades. The plant had enough capacity to handle the early flows from Panasonic,” Rutkowski said. “To get the pump station going and electrical gear online, those portions happened first. This gave us time to work with Panasonic and continue to refine the rest of the plant upgrades.”
By splitting out that critical path design and procurement work, the design team was able to focus on establishing the electrical demand model and then providing the equipment specifications for procurement. This also provided an interim approach to powering the pump station so it could be put into service while the new electrical power equipment was being fabricated and delivered.
“It allowed the city to have a functional pump station and meet Panasonic’s schedule of having treatment available as soon as they could get their production lines running,” Keller said.
The progressive design-build model also allowed the team to move quickly, reaching 30 percent design in less than five months to meet the aggressive timeline. Because the collaborators were together from day one with the client, it made a seamless experience.
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“It was really the power of our team between Burns & McDonnell and CAS, that history of working together, so we didn’t lose any time on the upfront,” Rutkowski said. “I have a good handle on how they approach their work, so it gave us a leg up because we didn’t need to have a lot of discussion on that front.”
The design-build cost $41.7 million, including both design and construction. Working under the watchful eye of state regulators posed little challenge, as the project is such a huge income driver for the entire state and economic boom, the state threw in additional resources to ensure timelines were maintained and approvals were fast and efficient.
Throughout, CAS self-performed key scopes such as excavation, concrete formwork, and process piping, which helped with speed, quality control, and cost efficiency.
“In terms of self-perform, our main driver there was we wanted to try to control the majority of the critical path in the project,” Rutkowski said. “That’s not trying to discount any of our trade partners. All the subs and vendors involved in this project are highly qualified folks we have an extensive history with. When you can control the excavation, the concrete, and the process equipment setting, that gives us the ability to accelerate scopes if there’s variables that are changing. This way, if we needed to bring more manpower or equipment to it, we could do that.”
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For instance, during this past winter, heavy snowfall resulted in some loss of time. By controlling these scopes through self-perform, CAS was able to pick up the pace once the weather got better to get back on schedule.
One of the biggest issues with the project was coordinating construction around an active wastewater treatment facility, with CAS tasked with limiting disruptions to ongoing operations.
An existing facility always adds extra challenges to any project, but it is one of the things that Rutkowski personally finds exhilarating.
“We’re heavily coordinating with the plant staff throughout this project because our No. 1 goal is that we don’t disrupt their treatment process,” he said. “There are always parts or pieces of the project where you have to stop or bypass flow to accomplish some level of the work we do. We looked for redundancies so that we always had a backup plan.”
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A good portion of the project involved building a new treatment basin and a new process building — standalone pieces that the team has been working on for the past year, with both expected to come online this fall.
“In late spring, early summer, we got into several of the buildings of the treatment plant, like the headwork, and the only way to accomplish that work is bypass around the structure,” Rutkowski said. “As a team, we work on isolating the building and keeping the rest of the plant operational while accompanying the work. We sit around the table and come up with two to three different approaches and then meet with the city to make sure we all agree on the right approach.”
Meeting stringent nutrient removal standards for nitrogen and phosphorus was also a challenge, as it required a combined chemical-physical-biological strategy.
“A lot of that is starting with the treatment design,” Rutkowski said. “That’s where the Burns & McDonnell engineering horsepower came in with design plans for hitting those treatment limits.”
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The team considered several locations for the new equipment, and they chose one that supported easier chemical delivery by vendors and reduced the amount of building renovation to meet fire protection requirements.
“A total of three windows will be removed at the headworks, but otherwise no other code-driven renovations are required to install this new system,” Keller said.
Additionally, recognizing that long-lead procurement could be a big hindrance for the job, Rutkowski noted that “front-loading” the electrical design helped mitigate supply chain risks.
“Early on, we saw lead time and delivery for electrical gear was pushing close to almost two years in length,” he said. “Before we were even selected, we knew that would be our No. 1 challenge, and there are not a lot of different alternatives to work around that. We worked with electrical gear suppliers and electricians to understand what we needed, and then we vetted that through different manufacturers.”
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That electrical gear arrived in August of 2025, which is much earlier than it would have been had the team not built an early work package around this scope.
When complete, the project will double treatment capacity from 1.3 million gallons per day to 2.6 million gallons per day and will introduce new processes to meet tighter water quality standards for nitrogen and phosphorus. Improvements also include upgraded safety and security features.
“We are very close to being complete within the main treatment basin,” Rutkowski said. “We are still finishing up some of the minor underground piping systems. The process building itself, which houses the electrical gear, the blowers, the tertiary filter, is just about ready to go, with the electrical gear being the last real piece for that building.”
The crew is also currently working through the UV/disinfection process to keep the system online and upgrading it sequentially.
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“We’re shooting for mid-fall as to when we will turn on the new treatment basin and start sending flow through,” Rutkowski said. “It needs to stabilize. And then late fall, we will go into the existing treatment basin and [perform] our upgrade inside of it. We are on track to get it fully complete in March of 2026.”
The site will also be ready for future expansion and the broader commercial, industrial, and residential growth expected in the area.
“Future expansion is a fun topic because it can be a very broad discussion. It can have a lot of cost and schedule impacts, depending on the level the city wants to go to,” Rutkowski said. “Working through this topic with the city, we all quickly realized we didn’t need to build the wastewater treatment upgrades to handle all the potential future growth. We just needed to build it in phases and to make sure it is expandable.”
The plan drawings outline the space to build a tertiary filter and concrete basin, so it will be ready to go when any future growth happens.
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“This project has been very unique, considering all the public and political visibility of the work, the tight deadlines, and working with the city as well as Panasonic,” Keller said. “It’s an ideal place for a delivery method like progressive design-build, where the infrastructure solution can be quickly adapted to the needs of new industries. As other opportunities show up for small communities like De Soto, we are looking forward to continued application of PDB as part of the solution to infrastructure growth.”
- Owner: City of De Soto, Kansas
- Design-Builder: Burns & McDonnell, Kansas City, Missouri; CAS Constructors, Topeka, Kansas
- Subcontractors: Davin Electric Inc. (electrical); Cannon Building Systems Inc. (pre-engineered metal building); R.E. Pedrotti Company Inc. (instrumentation and SCADA); McElroy’s Inc. (HVAC and plumbing); Decker Construction Services Inc. (shoring and excavation for the influent pump station)
