Posted on April 13, 2017
By Mary Hansen, SJR
City Water, Light and Power is downsizing plans for a second lake.
Past designs put Hunter Lake’s capacity at about 21 million gallons per day, while an updated design is likely to be around 12 million gallons, CWLP’s water division manager Ted Meckes said Tuesday.
The reduced size provides room to build sediment basins and implement other strategies to prevent soil erosion and fertilizer runoff from seeping into the lake.
The updated design is part of an environmental study that the city needs to complete to obtain a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The study will determine the most cost effective and least environmentally damaging option to meet the need for a backup water source to Lake Springfield.
Hunter Lake’s lower capacity could come with a slightly smaller price tag than the last estimate for the lake, which was around $110 million. But Meckes said the cost analysis wouldn’t be complete for several months.
“It’s smaller, but there’s costs to do some of the best-management practices and water-quality issues that we’re trying to address, there’s costs to that,” said Bill Elzinga, senior associate at Amec Foster Wheeler, the engineering firm the city has hired to assist with the study.
A smaller second lake would still meet the city’s projected water needs over the next nearly 50 years, Elzinga said.
An analysis Elzinga presented to the Springfield City Council Tuesday night showed the projected water need at around 10.8 million gallons per day from a second water source to meet a demand of more than 30 million gallons in 2065.
Ward 1 Ald. Chuck Redpath raised concerns about what he said is growing competition with other communities for water sources in the region.
“I think some of those communities are more limited in reaching great distances, because of their size, because of their funding, because of their population base and so on,” Elzinga answered. “You stand on a little better footing to reach farther because of that.”
The city plans to complete a draft environmental study for the public to review at the end of this year, and to submit to the Army Corps by March of next year.
Source: SJR
