Thornton residents and business owners should brace for another water bill increase in January.
The city is continuing to gather funds for its multi-million dollar water plan that includes a new, 70-mile pipeline from a river north of Fort Collins and replacing a failing water treatment plant built in the 1950s.
The costs for those plans and other water-related projects aimed to better serve the city’s rising population are around half a billion dollars. But city officials say the incrementally increasing water and tap fees, which have gone up for three consecutive years, should be able to cover most of the cost.
“Those rate increases pay not just for the (water treatment plant) replacement, but also the pipeline and the reservoirs and everything else that the utility has to do,” said Mark Koleber, Thornton’s water supply director. “It’s really just ensuring that we have the money to continue to provide reliable, high-quality water to all of our customers.”
The largest projects currently in the planning stages include a $425 million water pipeline from the Cache La Poudre River in Fort Collins and a $75 million water treatment plant to be built next to the antiquated Thornton Water Treatment Plant at 9520 Ellen Court.
Since Thornton acquired its original water treatment plant in the 1960s, it has been added to three times. About five years ago, an analysis of the maintenance costs to keep it running for another 10 years was about the same as building a new facility that will work for double that time.
Thornton budgets about $60,000 a year on top of operational costs just to fix the various system failures that regularly occur there.
“The plant is 65 years old, and it’s getting to the point where it’s failing and breaking down mechanically,” said Nicole Poncelet-Johnson, Thornton’s water treatment and quality manager. “We are kind of duct taping it together for the next four years.”
The city hopes to begin construction on a 20 million gallon-a-day plant around 2018, opening in 2020. The new, gravity-powered facility will also be built with the ability to take in three of the city’s water sources. The existing plant only treats water from Standley Lake in Westminster.
“So the new plant will treat water from not only the water that will be coming from Standley and the Poudre, but — if we can afford it — also that water that we get off the South Platte River so that we can run three sources of water to that plant and ensure that we have a supply to treat at all times,” Poncelet-Johnson said. “Right now, if Standley Lake gets interrupted or dried up, we’d lose 20 million gallons a day of capacity right off the bat and citizens could potentially not have water.”
Water from the South Platte River is treated at the Wes Brown Water Treatment Plant at 3651 E. 86th Ave., which was renovated in 2005 to become a membrane water treatment plant. That improvement also increased the plants operational costs, however, making it about five times more expensive to run than the conventional gravity-powered design of the old and future Thornton Water Treatment Plants.
Construction on Thornton’s longest pipeline is slated to begin around 2019 and be complete in 2025. The old treatment plant will be demolished, but city officials say that the land will be preserved to build a third water treatment facility around 2035, as projected demand dictates.
The pipeline project should bring enough water to Thornton to carry its growth for another 50 years.
“Certainly the pipeline project and the water treatment plant are projects necessary to keep up with the (population) growth in the city,” Koleber said. “We’ve been watching that growth, and we see it picking up after the recession and we know that now is the time to really get going on transferring the water supply, which the city has owned since the 1980s, into Thornton.”
The city is also buying and readying a cache of new and previously decommissioned reservoirs like the West Sprat Reservoir to store the augmented water supply.
There are no more approved water rate increases after January, but officials say they may bring the question to continue increases to city council next year after the costs of these projects are evaluated next to annual inflation.
The rate increases from January 2015 to 2017 have all been the same — last year, t The standard family bill is about $41.50.
Precise numbers on the increase are difficult to pinpoint, as citywide uses vary dramatically between households and businesses. But as the rate increases have been instituted, Thornton’s on the city website has helped residents figure out their exact bill with an address and account number.
The city also has a website — — where residents can find water bill rebate programs and conservation suggestions to help manage their rates now and into the future.