CITY OF MORRO BAY PUBLIC SERVICES DEPARTMENT

955 SHASTA AVENUE MORRO BAY, CA 93442 (805) 772-6261

MEMORANDUM TO: MAYOR AND CITY COUNCIL FROM: DYLAN WADE, UTILITIES/CAPITAL PROJECTS MANAGER SUBJECT: PERC FACILITIES TOUR DATE: SEPTEMBER 7, 2010 On August 3rd and August 13th of this year staff from Morro Bay and the Cayucos Sanitary District toured the Santa Paula Water Recycling and Mountain House Water Recycling Facilities both designed and constructed by PERC water. The Santa Paula facility was built to replace a plant that was last upgraded in the 1980s through a public private partnership. The Mountain House facility was developer built and turned over to the Mountain House Community Services District to replace their plant which was built in 2000 as a condition of development of a master planned community. This memorandum will report on staffs observations from these site visits however, it is important to note that the Santa Paula facilities are very new, and both Santa Paula and Mountain House facilities are operating at levels far below their design capacity making them effectively untested designs. As such, any potential treatment capacity issues related to flows and loadings are many years away from being experienced.

Facility Summary

Facility Summary

Santa Paula
Design flow rate of 3.4 MGD Current flow rate of 2.0 MGD MBR process with additional treatment through Reverse Osmosis for onsite reuse. Disinfection by UV light. Disposal of wastewater by percolation No active off site reuse.

Mountain House
Design flow rate of 3.0 MGD Current flow rate of .5 MGD SBR process with tertiary filtration through cloth filters with large open air sewage bypass ponds Disinfection by UV light. Disposal of wastewater by river discharge No active reuse.

Based on the visits to both of the facilities there are several features that left a positive

impression on the staff who visited them. These positive impressions are discussed below. First and foremost both of the plants visited produced a high quality tertiary effluent, capable of meeting the full secondary treatment requirements similar to the currently proposed MBCSD plant. In addition, both plants are capable of producing an effluent capable of meeting Title 22 for Unrestricted reuse provided they meet the prerequisite disinfection requirements. Santa Paula has been discussed during public comment period at recent JPA meetings as having a superior appearance. While the architectural treatment of the building exterior is suitable for a public works facility, the exterior treatment is basic and not extraordinary. The site amenities consisting of a water feature, trellis, retaining wall, and plantings are very attractive and well-done. When the plant is viewed from the optimum location, the appearance is excellent. However, this facility, like any working treatment plant, has business sides with uncovered basins, process equipment, chemical tanks, bridge crane, rollup doors, vehicles, and related gear that is open and visible. Both the Santa Paula and Mountain House plant has a substantial site buffer that minimizes the need to screen the open sides of the facilities from public view. A third potentially positive observation was that both plants had low staffing levels (about three operators each) which may greatly reduce their staffing costs. One of the reasons that these plants can have such low staffing is that maintenance is handled by outside parties. In the case of Santa Paula, PERC maintenance crews from Arizona can come to California to perform routine maintenance. In the case of Mountain House, the contract operators simply hire outside contractors to do the maintenance work, and then charge those repairs with a mark-up to the Community Services District. Neither facility is adequately staffed to deal with emergency operations, but the concept of splitting maintenance functions from operational staff is not a new one. For example this has been discussed in Morro Bay in regards to the Harbor Department maintenance activities. This concept may be worth future consideration by the JPA because it may have the potential to produce some operational cost savings. The final positive impression left at the facilities was the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system. Either of the plants SCADA systems is much more functional and modern than the antiquated system in use at the current plant. At both Santa Paula and Mountain House the operators were very pleased with the ability to access the plant treatment process from remote locations. This system is another factor that has let them reduce their staffing levels. There are a number of items of concern in common between the two facilities and there are items of concern unique to each plant design that will also be discussed below: The basic premise of the design used in both of these plants is a common wall construction with non process facilities located over process facilities. This design approach leads to several potential positive outcomes, the first and most positive being the potential for reduced up front construction costs, the second positive outcome is a reduced plant foot print making more land available for development (Mountain House) or for other corporation uses (Santa Paula). There are also significant negative outcomes associated with this design choice, The first of these

negative outcomes is confined space and limited access to important process equipment and structures for repairs and routine maintenance and inspection. Enclosure of wastewater process basins requires confined space entry access. Santa Paula has only been in service for several months and access has not been an issue to date. Mountain House has been in service for about three years and numerous equipment repair issues have arisen that require access to the covered wastewater process basins. In Mountain House this negative outcome was readily apparent where they had experienced process failures and had to repeatedly take down basins for repairs, equipment replacement, and maintenance. They are fortunate enough to be located far away from any sensitive odor receptors, and so they are able to store incoming sewage in large open bypass ponds. At the time of our visit staff was preparing to access a digester to replace a failed piece of equipment. Due to the extremely low inflows to the plant, they were able to take the digester offline, but with inflows anywhere near design flows, this would not be possible. The wastewater process basins contain submersible mixers, aeration diffusers, and foam spray systems that will require inspection and service for desired preventative maintenance and repair. Industry standard practice would require confined space entry at a minimum of once or twice per year to maintain these systems. It is important to note that the covered wastewater process basins preclude full visual observation of aeration, mixing, and spray patterns that is normally conducted on a routine basis by operators several times per shift at most treatment plants. Routine visual observation is highly desirable to notice any changes in aeration, mixing, and spray patterns that could signify clogging or malfunction. At Santa Paula the pretreatment equipment (first-stage screening, grit removal, and second-stage screening) was installed in very close proximity and without an overhead bridge crane or monorail for equipment removal. Future access and removal of pretreatment equipment for service, repair, and/or replacement will be inconvenient and difficult. The pretreatment equipment at Mountain House is not as densely configured. The sludge thickening and sludge dewatering equipment at Mountain House is not as densely configured as the Santa Paula pretreatment equipment. However, no overhead monorail, bridge crane, or roof hatches are provided for removal of these equipment items. The installation of future equipment will compound access difficulties because the removal of one equipment item may necessitate the removal of its companion equipment item. At Mountain House, there was a pump that had to be pulled to allow bypass pumping from one basin to another. In order to pull this pump operators had disassembled the wall louver to gain access for the removal of the pump. Another negative outcome from this design decision is that non process areas are located above and adjacent to process areas. For example Santa Paula there is a hatch in the lab floor where the operators access the waste water process equipment. When this hatch is open, the office space becomes an active wastewater treatment process exposure. The types of material used in the construction of a process area are of a necessity, and by code, very different than those used in an office space. It is unclear how this potential code issue was considered in the design of Santa Paula. This also leads to noise considerations with the high frequency noise from the blower room leaking into the office space.

An additional ramification from this design decision is the exposure of the underside of the office spaces to damaging sewer gasses (especially hydrogen sulfide). The ventilation system installed in the facility will help mitigate but does not eliminate this risk. In many facilities were sewage is contained a further step to reduce this risk is the epoxy lining of the process basins. Neither Santa Paula nor Mountain House had epoxy lining of basins. At Mountain House there were areas where it appeared corrosion of the concrete had begun to occur, and significant corrosion problems were documented by their operations staff with materials breaking and falling into the treatment process which required subsequent shut downs and entry into the treatment processes. In addition to the potential for damaging sewer gases, the reinforced concrete deck covering the wastewater process basins is subject to cracking and subsequent moisture migration. These deficiencies may not be evident in the initial years of operation, but with time will become more and more prevalent. Evidence of hairline cracking of concrete floors at Mountain House was visible is some areas. The moisture migration is particularly problematic as the concrete reinforcement steel becomes subject to corrosion and the structural integrity of the concrete floors becomes compromised. The materials of construction used at both Santa Paula and Mountain House would be inappropriate in the marine environment where our plant is sited. There would have to be significant changes in many of the materials used at the plant. While the block buildings and concrete of the basins would be appropriate, the light metal roofing system, the exposed galvanized conduits, and other ferrous materials would quickly corrode at the MBCSD treatment plant. The effort to minimize construction costs, the plant at Mountain House led to other issues that left visiting staff with concerns. One of the hatches broke while being closed by the operator. A number of other pieces of process equipment had failed. All of the pumps had to be rebuilt, and a number of mechanical support systems had to be reworked because they had failed and fallen into the process trains. While some of the equipment failures, particularly with the pumps, can be attributed to the delay between using the plant 2007 and building it in 2005, because of insufficient inflows for this type of treatment process, many of them were from improper design, specification, or construction. The treatment plant process was also designed so that there are two basins through which the sewage is processed. As the flows approach design flows, these basins will not be able to taken offline without the need to bypass to the flow from the plant to open air bypass lagoons. With the more highly variable flows at the MBCSD wastewater treatment plant these types of issues would have to be taken into consideration. In summary, the plants at both Mountain House and Santa Paula are relatively new facilities that have never treated anything near their design flows. Even at a low flow rate the Mountain House facility has experienced and inordinate amount of process failures. These failures can in many cases be attributed to poor design, specification, or construction practices all of which were performed by PERC water or their partners PACE engineering. By specifying low cost materials and combining process walls to save construction costs, it is likely that the initial cost for the PERC facility will be lower than the traditional Design Bid Build process and plant currently being pursued, however these

upfront cost savings measures will be offset by down the road expenditures. The tours underscore the difficulty and complexity of the comparison between the current project approach and the proposed PERC project approach on an equal basis. It will be difficult for Kitchell Construction to bring to the JPA board a comparison of the two alternatives for the following reasons: 1. Kitchell staff will have to assign numeric factors to value judgements such as what are quality, reliability, ownership and control of the process worth to the citizens of Morro Bay. 2. Comparison of treatment technologies of oxidation ditch with tertiary filtration, MBR, and hybrid SBR with tertiary filtration all in context of future reclaimed water capability. 3. Campus style configuration vs. common roof/common wall/stacked configuration with the attendant life-cycle complications and consequences. 4. Project delivery methods of Design/Bid/Build, Design/Build, Design/Build/Operate, and Design/Build/Operate/Finance of which the latter two have implicit privatization consequences. In conclusion, staff did not observe anything in these site visits that would change our recommendation from keeping with the current Design Bid Build process and completing the plant project as quickly as possible.