By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
Construction on a major sewer trunk line to serve continuing development on the city’s north side could begin as early as next summer, city council members have learned.
Del Rio City Council members heard updates on several major water and wastewater system projects during their regular meeting on April 25.
Assistant City Public Works Director Greg Velazquez introduced the contracted engineers who gave the updates and told the council he has been with the city for 20 years and is happy to see some of the long-term projects the city has been planning finally come to fruition.
Javier Esquivel of STV (formerly CP&Y) in San Antonio, the company designing the northside sewer trunk line, gave a detailed update on the project.
“I’m going to provide you all with a status update, where we’re at in the design, in the easement acquisition and a look ahead over the next year-and-a-half for where we’ll be in completing the design and construction,” Esquivel told the council.
“The northside sewer line is a large-diameter replacement project for the existing northside trunk line. The current line . . . goes from the Edwards Street lift station off of Lausen Road, which is north of Walmart, travels all the way around the city, passes the airport, with outfall into the Silverlake Wastewater Treatment Plant (off Frontera Road),” Esquivel said.
“The primary purpose of this project was to provide a capacity upgrade and a condition upgrade to the aging infrastructure, so it’ll just pretty much replace the existing line and allow for future development on the north side,” he added.
He said currently, designs for the replacement line are 60 percent completed.
Esquivel said the line will be approximately seven miles long and will contain pipe from 12 inches to 33 inches at the outfall at the treatment plant.
Esquivel said the next step would be the acquisition of easements.
The easement acquisition contract, he said, kicked off earlier this year and would be overseen by HRM Land Acquisition Solutions of Blanco, Texas, under Tetra Tech’s contract. Abner Martinez of Del Rio’s Amistad Consulting Services, Inc., will assist with the surveying, he added.
Esquivel said the company would work to acquire 57 temporary construction easements and 36 permanent easements.
“Of those 36 easements, 20 of them currently exist, with the existing line, so this would just be a minor upsize of those existing parcels, and again, that’s just to accommodate the larger diameter of the pipeline. There will be 16 parcels with new easements, and that’s just to adjust for the new alignments (of the line),” Esquivel said.
“Our goal was to primarily keep it as much as possible in the existing easements that the city owns and right-of-way, to avoid acquiring new easements, but with the growth of the city and development, we’re going to have to tweak the alignment a little bit to acquire new land,” he added.
Esquivel reminded the council the northside trunk line replacement is “a large project, with a lot of moving parts.”
He noted the environmental process for the project is ongoing.
“This is a critical component for Texas Water Development Board (TWDB)-funded projects, so one of the first things we did was to submit an engineering feasibility report, which is a high-level summary, early on in the project, that showed the Texas Water Development Board where the alignment’s going to be, the size of the sewer-shed that we’re looking at, and again, we met with the city to look at where (future) development is going to go and what we’re anticipating over the next 50 years.
“We did this in 2020, so through 2070, what are the anticipated flows that are going to be coming in and account for those, make sure we’re going to be able to set this alignment and we should be comfortable for the next 50 years with any future development,” Esquivel said.
He said before the feasibility report could be approved, the company had to submit an environmental impact document, which was submitted to TWDB in March 2022.
“I’m happy to announce that late last year, the TWDB issued a FONSI, a finding of no significant impact, so it’s been environmentally cleared. There are some minor notes, some construction notes we need to add to the plans, but no major red flags with the current alignment,” Esquivel said.
The engineering feasibility report is now awaiting final approval, which should come this month, Esquivel told the council.
“That will allow the city to receive the funds for the completion of the design,” he said.
Because of the size of project, Esquivel said the work has been divided into six segments.
“The purpose of this was, we anticipated with the funding we wanted to make sure we could package various segments, depending how much funding was available, and so, moving on from 60 percent (design completion), we will proceed with segments one and two, which will take us (from the Silverlake Wastewater Treatment Plant) all the way (north) to Cantu Road,” Esquivel said.
He said the reason the project will begin with segments one and two is that this is where the alignment of the pipeline shifts away from the existing infrastructure.
Esquivel said the first phase of the project will include segments one and two, with the design for those segments of the line estimated to be complete by the end of the year and easement acquisition completed by May 2024.
Esquivel said he believed the TWDB review would be done by May 2024, with the construction contract to be awarded next summer and project completion by the summer of 2026.
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