Montgomery County starts $65M sewer project
Construction on a new pump station on Dryden Road in Moraine and a pretreatment facility at the Western Regional Water Reclamation Facility in West Carrollton broke ground Wednesday.
The pump will help push millions of gallons of wastewater so it can be treated at the reclamation facility. An average of 20 million gallons of wastewater is handled by the county’s water reclamation facilities a day. Last year, about 7.5 billion gallons of wastewater were treated by the Western and Eastern Water Reclamation Facilities, county officials said.
The $65 million project is named the Montgomery County Sewer Modernization and Revitalized
Treatment Program (SMART). It is the largest project Montgomery County has invested in.
“For families and businesses it
is vitally important,” Montgomery County Administrator Michael Colbert said, noting that more than half a million residents in the county depend on local water reclamation facilities.
“If you think of how many times someone uses the shower, how many times someone flushes a toilet, how many times a kitchen sink and garbage disposals are utilized, all of that waste has to go somewhere and this is one of those places,” Colbert said.
The county has provided sewer services for nearly 100 years, Montgomery County Commission President Carolyn Rice said, and the new infrastructure will allow the county to continue to provide the services for 100 years more.
“We cannot let our aging systems fail our citizens,” Rice said.
Ulliman Schutte, a local company, was awarded the contract, county officials said, and subcontractors will also be hired which will create new jobs.