St. Petersburg is looking at roughly $3.4 billion in water and wastewater infrastructure needs through 2050, much of it tied to an aging network of pipes buried beneath city streets.
City water officials laid out the long-term picture during an Aug. 20 City Council Committee of the Whole meeting. The work covers the systems that deliver drinking water, carry sewage and distribute reclaimed water, and will feed into an updated St. Pete Water Plan for the coming decades.
The biggest share is water distribution. The city is projecting about $1.4 billion in needs through 2050, including replacement of downtown mains, a critical main near Bayfront Hospital and the much larger job of replacing aging pipes across St. Petersburg.
Downtown shows what the city is dealing with. Council members discussed a study area containing 21.99 miles of water mains, about 20.49 miles of which were classified as very high risk. Half of those pipes are at least 75 years old. The rest are between 50 and 74 years old.
The problem extends well beyond downtown.
“There are hundreds of miles of water main that need replacement over the next 30 years,” Water Resources Director John Palenchar said.
The roughly $3.4 billion figure is not a spending package awaiting council approval. It is the current long-range estimate of water-resources needs as city staff works through individual facilities and decides what should be built, replaced or repaired first.
The work extends well beyond drinking-water pipes. Current planning puts sewer collection needs at about $576 million through 2050, while reclaimed water carries a $158 million baseline. The Northeast, Northwest and Southwest water reclamation facilities also carry separate long-term capital needs.
Council Chair Lisset Hanewicz noted that those costs still do not account for everything St. Petersburg must build and maintain. The city has separate stormwater needs and other capital projects competing for money.
How quickly St. Petersburg can work through the water list is closely tied to what customers pay. Hanewicz said about 73% of the capital funding discussed comes from water revenues, with Penny for Pinellas and other sources making up the balance.
She asked staff to spell out the consequence of cutting utility rates when the cost of operating the system does not fall with them.
“If you reduce utility rates, what happens? Operating costs, a lot of them stay the same,” Hanewicz said. “You have to take away from the capital improvement plan.”
Not every project in the long-range forecast will necessarily be built as currently envisioned. Staff is still deciding which work needs to happen soon, what can wait and how much protection the city wants to build into its water and wastewater facilities.
Those choices include how much storm and flood resilience to require, whether wastewater treatment plants should be better connected, how to deal with tighter nitrogen limits and whether it makes financial sense to expand reclaimed-water storage. The agenda packet identifies those issues among the major decisions that will shape the next Water Plan.
Whatever the final plan includes, much of the investment will disappear from view once crews finish the work and close the streets back up.
Council member Copley Gerdes said that can make the scale of the investment easy to overlook.
“We have made hundreds of millions of dollars of investment into this since this plan has started, except you can’t see it because they are underground,” Gerdes said.