WICHITA, KS — The joint venture team of Alberici and Burns & McDonnell welcomed city, state, and federal officials for a ribbon-cutting to celebrate the completion of the construction of a new water treatment plant designed to serve the Wichita, Kansas, region for generations to come.
The $500 million Northwest Water Facility, officially renamed the Wichita Water Works, is set to be fully operational in early 2025. It is the largest infrastructure project in the city's history, with contributions from thousands of people and numerous local contractors, service providers, and small businesses. More than 77 percent of all contracted dollars stayed local to Wichita, and more than 12 percent of contracted dollars went to emerging, disadvantaged, minority-owned, and/or woman-owned businesses.
The project is part of the city’s Local Water Supply Plan, created nearly 30 years ago to invest in a sustainable water supply. This plan outlined strategic steps to secure the city’s future water supply: conservation, changes to the water utility rate structure, establishment of the ability to optimize resource allocation (especially during drought), and expansion of the city's water supply through innovation.
The treatment plant will provide a high-quality and reliable water supply for Wichita and surrounding communities and is a critical step in securing Wichita’s water future. The water treatment facility, designed and constructed with a high level of redundancy, replaces an 80-year-old plant and will deliver up to 120 million gallons per day, providing safe, clean drinking water for generations to come. As the largest regional water provider in Kansas, the City of Wichita serves more than 500,000 Kansans, 17 percent of the state’s population. Built to last, the plant includes a main building as big as several football fields, clarifiers among the country’s largest, and pipes up to 7 feet in diameter.
Early cost certainty provided by the progressive design-build delivery method allowed the City of Wichita to lock in low interest rates and avoid the high cost associated with record inflation at the project’s onset in 2020, saving more than $100 million in financing costs alone.
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“The City of Wichita has set a benchmark for other cities in planning future water security,” said Ron Coker, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Water Group at Burns & McDonnell. “Using a progressive design-build delivery method, the city was able to get to a more secure water future quicker and more cost-effectively with an under-budget and on-schedule project.”
