It also will see construction of a new pretreatment facility at the West Carrollton plant, Hilliard said.
Pre-treatment will move from the Dryden Road facility to West Carrollton, where water from county sewers will be treated to be safely discharged back into local rivers, he said.
“The facility at Dryden Road was built in the late 1970s and has required some costly repairs there,” he said. “There’s a lot of work that needs done.”
The county’s sewer system uses several screens to filter out larger matter. The water then undergoes chemical treatment at the Moraine facility and is tested before it is released back into the rivers.
Montgomery County has approximately 30,000 sewer connections that flow to the West Carrollton plant the majority of which are funneled through the Dryden Road facility, Hilliard said.
While individual pieces of equipment have been replaced or rebuilt, a significant portion of the equipment is original, he said. Due to the corrosive nature of sewage, equipment life expectancy can vary from as little as 15 years to 25 years depending on the specific equipment and its application, Hilliard said.
There has never been a complete facility shutdown or untreated sewage releases, he said.
“We haven’t had a failure,” he said. “If we ever had a failure, if any of that infrastructure ever failed, it’s critical because two things are going to happen. Either we’re going to have a problem where the wastewater is going to go right into the river or it would cause backups in the system, so people’s homes, especially the ones with basements, we could have some backups.”
While nothing at the Dryden Road facility is considered “malfunctioning,” parts of the building feature aging equipment that is more costly to upgrade and maintain than to replace it altogether, Hilliard said.
“The building itself requires repairs, such as a new roof, new windows, HVAC upgrades, drywall replacement, electrical upgrades, etcetera, that require money to be spent on an already-aged building,” he said. “MCES performed a cost study on this property, and it was determined that moving our lab to downtown would be a better use of taxpayer dollars.”
The project will mean Montgomery County abandoning the four-stories-deep Dryden Road facility, but some of the office space on the first floor may be repurposed, he said. The laboratory there will move to downtown Dayton, Hilliard said.
Carrying out pre-treatment at the West Carrollton plant instead of the Dryden Road facility eliminates the cost of round-the-clock staffing and some of the maintenance costs, he said. Upgrading the county’s aging pumps protects the system as a whole.
“Like every other county in America, we deal with aging infrastructure,” Spokeswoman Megan O’Leary said. “In order to continue having reliable services for our residents, we need to make sure that this is not going to fail.”
Montgomery County commissioners on Tuesday approved a contract with Miami Twp.-based Ulliman Schutte Construction for design and construction of the project, which is expected to wrap up in 2024.
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