St. Paul opens the taps at new water treatment facility
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St. Paul’s water is now flowing from a new treatment plant.
Plant managers announced this week that the rebuilt McCarrons plant has now passed health and safety assessments. It’s a $250 million rebuild of the site, which cleans water from the Mississippi River and pumps it out to St. Paul and 14 surrounding cities.
Mayor Melvin Carter celebrated the opening with a toast of a glass of water, fresh from the new pipes. He said rebuilding the facility was no small feat.
“Every time you get that clean, odorless, colorless, tasteless water out of your faucet, you got to know that somebody has done a whole lot of work to deliver that Mississippi River water to that water that we can enjoy in our kitchens and our water fountains,” Carter said.
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The city started construction on a new plant in 2022, building on the same site as the old plant and repurposing some of its buildings. Officials said the infrastructure was aging, and the city wanted to do the project while interest rates were low.
City officials say customers shouldn’t notice any difference in how their water tastes – but there’s plenty of differences at the plant. Technology upgrades mean it’s much smaller than the old plant but has the capacity to clean more water.
The process starts with four new water clarifiers – giant tanks that each hold about two million gallons of water at a time and treat about 28 million gallons per day.
The 450,000 St. Paul Regional Water Services customers use about 40 million gallons per day in the winter, and up to about 70 million in the summer. That means the plant has the capacity to treat more water than the grid needs.
SPRWS General Manager Racquel Vaske said that extra capacity is an improvement.
“The old facility didn't have as many redundant points,” Vaske said. “There were a handful of points where, if that had to come offline, we didn't have a backup to work on that… you can take a breath and fix the problem the right way with this new option.”
The new plant also adds a process called ozonation – a step in water treatment that helps cut out any taste, smell and contaminants.
The new plant will still use the old filtration system – the last step in the process. Plant managers said that step didn’t need upgrades yet.
The rebuild was funded by loans from a state fund for water infrastructure. St. Paul officials had said in previous announcements that the construction could cause customers’ monthly water bills to go up between $6 and $8 between 2022 and 2025.
Crews will spend the next year demolishing remaining old parts of the plant and building a new water quality lab. Once that’s done, plant managers said they’ll reopen the site for public and school tours.
