Every dollar counts

Brush Wastewater Treatment Facility

Over 50 years ago, the City of Brush built their wastewater treatment facility. It was built with borrowed parts from the previous plant (a 1956 construction). And after all that time, the equipment and most of the infrastructure has significantly exceeded their service lives. For 15 years the City of Brush has been talking about a replacement—but with a population of 6,000 people, the estimated cost of $16 million seemed out of reach.

Our team worked with the city on several financing and design package options to arrive at a project value that would be affordable to all users. By fast tracking the design months ahead of the original schedule, we met stimulus funding requirements set by the Colorado Department of Health and Environment.

To save some money, we reused as much of the existing infrastructure as possible, and we worked with a contractor to ensure continuous value engineering. The plant’s design meets discharge criteria substantially more stringent than was required at the time, and that means the community will save millions of dollars in future improvements. The plant now exceeds newly adopted standards for total nitrogen and total phosphorous.

Their result? A new facility finished ahead of schedule for $10.8 million.