Contracts representing a $14.6 million investment are before the Manteca City Council on Tuesday is part of an effort to boost existing wastewater treatment plant capacity.

The city refers to the endeavor as increasing “interim capacity” while they work on another project to expand the footprint of the current facility to handle more residential, commercial, and industrial collections.

The work is being paid for from connection fees paid by new construction.

It does not impact the general fund used to support day-to-day municipal services such as police and fire as well as street maintenance.

If and when upgrades are made for systems that are wearing out or need to be updated to meet new state standards, the funds are taken from monthly sewer fees paid by existing users.

Back in November 2023, the City Council was told after completing several tweaks to the city’s wastewater treatment plant  the expectation was to have enough remaining capacity to accommodate between 3,000 to 4,000 more housing units.

That would-be enough to sustain roughly six years of the current housing growth rate of 600 to 700 units being built yearly.

Manteca, however, in the fiscal year ending June 30 issued permits for 978 additional single family homes.

If that continues, the expectation the work now underway would roughly add six years of capacity in the current treatment plant configuration could easily be reduced by a year or more.

The plant was designed to handle a flow of 9.23 million gallons of wastewater daily.

That capacity has been lessened over the years by state-mandated changes in the wastewater treatment process.

Solid waste loading issues, however, have effectively lowered the adjusted capacity even more.

 Staff in October 2023 when the revamp was first authorized, said the daily flow was between 7.3 million and 7.5 million gallons a day. The increased percentage of solids being processed due to water conservation measures is pushing the plant’s operational abilities  closer to where it would be capped at 8.5 million gallons a day.

The city is working on a fourth phase expansion project that is being timed to hopefully go online before capacity runs out.

The existing plant was designed to allow a seamless increase in capacity.

But as city leaders learned the hard way 25 years ago, shifting state water quality regulations can pop up in the middle of an expansion project to create potential delays.

It is against that backdrop that development  agreements — essentially contracts between developers that provide the city with additional amenities and infrastructure beyond what is minimally required in exchange for sewer allocation certainty in future years — are becoming a must.

That’s because builders in order to secure expensive upfront financing for major site work and infrastructure must prove to lenders they have the ability to build out the project.

The city’s growth rules as outlined in Ordinance 800 require a twice annual review of sewer capacity to determine if there is capacity left to award to those endeavors not covered by development agreements.

Allocating sewer allocations over a number of years in exchange for additional concessions to the city was a solution developers came up with in 1998.

They feared that the 13 active builders in Manteca at the time would end up suing each other if some did not secure allocations during the twice annual assessment and review of sewer capacity.

That paid off for the city in excess of $30 million in “bonus bucks” that were essentially unrestricted development agreement fees that the city could spent as they saw fit.

The money helped pay for a number of things such as completing the financing of the Union Road fire station, traffic signals for the Tidewater Bikeway, and lighted soccer fields to name a few. The bulk — $11.7 million — went to plug revenue shortfalls leading up to — and during — the Great Recession to cover day-to-day municipal services.

Critics point out the use of that money avoided the city from asking citizens for additional taxes or else cutback services.

This time around, development agreements in some cases contain unrestricted fees the council can spend without strings.

But for the most part they involve concessions such as requiring all homes in a subdivision to be part of a perpetual community facilities district to finance additional police and fire personnel as well as maintenance of streets and parks within a new neighborhood, purchase new fire engines and garbage trucks to service growth, and to pick up tabs for off-site infrastructure needs such as widening arterials that aren’t directly tied to a project’s impacts.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com