OTHELLO - Othello is pursuing drilling a new well after engineers reported it would cost more than $30 million to set up a reclaimed water facility.

Gray and Osborne engineers explained the costs during a recent city council meeting.

The report followed a resident suggesting using reclaimed water might allow the city to avoid drilling another well, City Administrator Ehman Sheldon said. Drilling a new well is estimated to cost the city about $1 million.

The city presently treats wastewater using a set of lagoons which feed into a tributary of Crab Creek, said Nancy Morter, a Grey and Osborne civil engineer. The city receives 1.4 million gallons of wastewater on an average day, with a peak of 2.18 million gallons in a day.

"The wastewater goes into these huge 40 to 50 acre ponds, stays there for probably up to 30, 40, if not longer, days ... The most treatment that you do is you do add disinfection from time to time."

The system is fairly common in Eastern Washington, Morter said. It is being squeezed out because of new regulations.

"You currently meet your permit. It's not a problem for you. It's just that those permits are going to get tighter and tighter with regulations," she said.

Morter explained Washington isn't the most progressive state for using reclaimed water. She said the southern US and California are more progressive in using reclaimed water.

"Their rules and regulations are far more developed and their need for reclaimed water is far more extensive," she said. "The idea of reclaimed water is to really treat wastewater and make it into something that's going to be a beneficial use for our community, rather than just discharging it into a creek."

Presently reclaimed water is categorized into four classes, ranked from Class A to Class D, Morter said. Each class has a different requirement in the amount of bacteria it can have in it, and what process needs to be used.

"As you get higher, the quality of that effluent gets lower," she said. "You currently disinfect to a requirement of 400 coliform (bacteria) per seven day mean, so you are twice as much as the lowest class of reclaimed water."

She explained the city doesn't disinfect often because the water is in the lagoons for so long most of the coliform bacteria are dying before the water is released.

"Where most of your coliform come from is the water fowl," Morter said. "So when you do disinfect, it's because of the water fowl."

Other area cities do produce Class A reclaimed water, including Warden, Quincy, Ephrata and Royal City, she said. All of the other plants were built because of different regulatory reasons.

"They were all built, with the exception of Warden, quite some time ago," Morter said.

Few places in the state have a utility to distribute reclaimed water, she said. It requires the city to make sure the water is used for specific purposes. State law requires the drinking water lines to be 10 feet away from any reclaimed water pipe.

"If this water was to be used in an industry, or just watering the lawn, and you have a major interruption of service, where your plant doesn't meet Class A standards ... then you'd have to have some talk about what that industry is going to do without water," she said.

If the city was putting the reclaimed water pipe on other people's property, officials would need to consider what the city's right is to go onto the property to make sure no reclaimed water is going into the drinking water pipes.

Morter estimated the cost of a conventional wastewater treatment plant would cost $25 million. To get reclaimed water, the city would need to spend $5 million to $7 million more. A distribution system to bring it to every home and business would be $50 million, and $7 million if the city wanted to only distribute it to the industries.

When water reclamation started, special funding did exist, but it ended, she said. The city could compete for funds from the state Department of Ecology, US Department of Agriculture rural development loans, Community Development Block Grants or Community Economic Revitalization Board grants. The funds aren't dedicated for wastewater reclamation facilities.

"The funding is just the regular run-of-the-mill stuff that you've heard of," she said. "All this funding is really competitive ... You're kind of thrown in with everyone else."

While Ecology does have some funding for "green" projects, Morter said an Ecology official explained water reclamation wasn't included because it uses a lot of energy.

"It's not necessarily green in their minds," she said. "If it is green, if it does prove that it takes less energy to make and it really is a benefit in terms of conserving water, they would only pay for those portions that make water reclamation, the $7 million. They wouldn't pay for the $25 million."