By CHRISTIE MASTRIC

Journal Staff Writer

MARQUETTE — The city of Marquette plans to put out a bid request today to build a biosolid processing facility at its wastewater treatment plant.

Mark O’Neill, director of municipal utilities, said the project stems from the treatment and disposal of biosolids at the wastewater treatment plant.

“We basically have two options,” O’Neill said. “We can either put them in the landfill, which is really expensive, or we can beneficially reuse them. That entails either hauling it out as liquid to Cleveland-Cliffs for their tailings basin to help them grow grass, or we can take it to a farmer’s field and apply it as fertilizer.”

In the winter months, though, applying biosolids in a field is not practical, said O’Neill, who noted that the treatment facility is required to have 180 days worth of storage to ensure it runs properly.

“Currently, we don’t have that,” O’Neill said. “So we kind of struggle when it comes late winter, early spring, and we can’t get out in the fields yet.”

O’Neill said the city has known about the biosolids project for a long time, but bidding prices “went crazy” during the COVID-19 pandemic and the project was put on hold. However, the city also realized grant money was possible.

“We knew we had a shovel-ready project, so we delayed it another year,” he said.

The city reapplied through the state of Michigan for Clean Water State Revolving Fund money, and obtained low-interest funding with a 50% loan forgiveness as a result.

The project is expected to cost about $11.7 million.The CWSRF would forgive an estimated $5.9 million.

“This project is taking care of the solids-storage problem that we have, but then there’s also a few other different little things throughout the plant that we want to fix, little bottlenecks that we have,” O’Neill said.

O’Neill acknowledged the project has two parts.

The core of it is a new biosolids-handling building with equipment that turns the material from liquid to a cake form.

“Instead of hauling biosolids with 3 percent solids and 97 percent water, you can haul something that’s more around 20 percent solids,” O’Neill said.

O’Neill noted that the plant already has a storage area, but the new one would be similar to the current one but use far less operator time to run the equipment and be more automated.

Also, the current storage area fills up too quickly, and the new one would create a bigger storage space for cakes and allow the city to meet the state requirement of 180 days storage.

“It’s going to really make our life easier as operators down here because we’ll be able to store material and wait a month until we can haul it away in the spring,” O’Neill said.

The other part of the project, he said, involves building a septage receiving station, for which Marquette County has a need. O’Neill said the city then could take in materials such as grease-trap waste and feed it into digestors, which would create more biogas.

O’Neill said the facility has two units, one of which always runs on biogas, with the other running on natural gas. By creating more biogas, the plant will be able to run that second unit on biogas more frequently.

Taking in materials would have another benefit.

“By taking that material in, it’s going to save revenue for us to help pay for this project,” O’Neill said.

The Michigan Department of Great Lakes, Environment and Energy recently announced that an EGLE review has determined that no significant environmental impacts would result from the project. However, it requests public input and comment on the preliminary decision that an environmental impact statement is not required.

Comments supporting or disagreeing with the decision should be submitted to Dan Beauchamp, EGLE section manager, Constitution Hall, P.O. Box 30457, Lansing, MI 48909-7957. No action on the project is to be taken within 30 days from the date of notice, which was Dec. 22. People also may contact Angela Yu, project manager, at 517-599-5487 or YuA@michigan.gov.

O’Neill said bids are due on Feb. 16, with the hope that the project would be finished some time in the winter/spring of 2024-25.

He said a possible $2.56 monthly increase for a residential user was an estimate for the environmental assessment. However, he stressed that figure is just an estimate, and many factors will go into how much of an impact this project has on rates.

The updated utility rate study performed by Raftelis, a municipal adviser, for the Marquette City Commission already included the cost of the project along with the 50% loan forgiveness.

However, this is not “set in stone,” said O’Neill, who pointed out that the city commission has to approve all increases annually. In the past, the 10-year plan was updated every couple of years.

The water, sewer and stormwater rate update is available at www.marquettemi.gov/municipal-utilities/.

Christie Mastric can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 250. Her email address is cbleck@miningjournal.net.