By NICK BUDD
Hays Post

The Hays City Commission will discuss renovating the city’s wastewater facility at its work session Thursday night. The current facility was built in the 1950s and hasn’t received many upgrades since.

A few years ago, the city was notified by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment that nitrogen and phosphate levels would need to be lowered due to new regulations. Since then, the city has worked with KDHE and private contractors to make modifications to the facility. During the most recent permitting process, the city was notified the standards again would be lowered significantly.

“We’ve became as efficient as we can to reduce levels.” said Assistant City Manager Paul Briseno. “The good news is that the city has four years to meet the new standards. The bad new is that we will probably have to have a reconstruction of the facility.”

According to Briseno, the limits will be put in place by July 2018, but the city does have the ability to meet them by 2019 due the six-month to one-year transitioning period. The city will look to bond the project, which will consist of both renovating and adding onto the existing facility.

“We’re currently looking at all of the options,” Briseno said. “We want to be as cost effective as we can, but at the same time we have to look 25-40 years in order to attain a plant that will last just as long as the one that was built in the 1950s.”

Preliminary estimates have the project costing between $23 million to $28 million. Briseno also said this is just the first of many meetings to come, noting that the process will be very lengthy. This is the only item on the agenda for Thursday night’s work session, which will begin at 7:30 p.m. due to the downtown Core2Campus event.