Tampa Bay Water expands to supply additional 12.5 million gallons of drinking water daily

TAMPA, Fla. - Tampa Bay Water serves 2.6 million people across the Tampa Bay area, but it's working to meet a growing demand for drinking water.

Tampa Bay Water serves customers in Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco counties as well as the City of Tampa, New Port Richey and St. Petersburg. On Monday, it broke ground on an expansion project to increase its daily supply by about 12.5 million gallons of water.

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By the numbers:

Tampa Bay Water officials said in 2003, the plant originally took in about 66 million gallons of water a day. In 2010, it expanded to handle about 120 million gallons of water a day.

This new expansion is expected to increase the intake capacity to about 145 million gallons a day. The $181 million project will increase the plant's daily supply.

"This plant will provide us another 12.5 million gallons a day," Tampa Bay Water's General Manager Chuck Carden said.

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Big picture view:

The project is a public-private partnership with contracted teams.

"We're taking an existing plant, and we're adding unit processes to it to give it more capacity," Mike Kuhn, the director of Capital Program Management with Veolia, said. "So, we have to increase also the amount of water that can come into it."

Kuhn said they don't need to increase the amount of water that comes out of the plant, because it's already built to capacity.

"We do need to add more capacity to internal unit processes to treat more water," he said.

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Project leaders said they will be adding piping and valves from onsite storage to plant influent, adding biologically active filter, putting in a new ozone treatment system, and expanding clarification treatment and disinfection and residual systems.

"We have an excess capacity," Carden said. "It's just the water to put in it. And so, we can expand this plant over and over, over again. But then it's on the other side of having enough water to put in it."

What they're saying:

Carden said they want to keep up with the growth without getting too far ahead of it.

"Right now, we're taking water out of the Alafia River, the Hillsborough River, and the Tampa Bypass Canal that feeds this plant," he said. "And, there's just so much water that can be provided by that."

Project leaders said the expansion allows them to keep up with the growing population in the region.

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"What the plant does, with the expansion, it'll just allow us to treat more of that," Kuhn said. "Let's say, less left on the table."

Tampa Bay Water said the cost of the project is factored into the rates it charges each municipality.

"We charge them a rate, that rate pays back a debt service," Carden said. "So, we actually borrowed some money. The project budget is $181 million, and we borrowed the money on a 30-year debt service payment and so, that's already included in the rates and so, there's no additional funding needed."

What's next:

The expansion is expected to be finished in 2028, and will meet the drinking water needs of the region through 2033. Tampa Bay Water said it's already eyeing additional projects in the future.

"And it will be various projects," Carden said. "This is just one of the projects. If we do another surface water treatment plant, it'll probably be a brand new plant. This plant is probably not going to be expanded because of the supply of the source water. So we'll probably build another surface water treatment plant on the smaller version somewhere near another river source in the area."

Tampa Bay