City holds ribbon cutting for Wastewater Treatment Plant

Perryville was in dire need of a new Wastewater Treatment Plant and they finally got one. The city built and installed a brand-new Oxidation Ditch Wastewater Treatment Plant and held a ribbon cutting for the completed project on Sept. 21.
“For the sewer plant, it’s the only time that most of you will have a chance to see it,” Perryville City Administrator Brent Buerck said. “It’s really important for what we do here in Perryville. We are very proud of it.”
The new and improved plant, which has been in use since July 22, is more advanced than the previous one. It is the second design build in Missouri, and first under new legislation. The city of Perryville voted on a bond issue several years ago for projects like this. The plant was funded through an SRF funded design build for $30 million. The funding gave the city approximately $27 million and Perryville paid for the rest through bonds.
The old facility was put into operations in 1976 with a flow capacity of 100,000 gallons per day. Since then, the plant had undergone three major upgrades in 1984, 1997 and 2006. The maximum capacity was 1.8 million gallon per day with the current daily flow average of 1 million gallons per day of influent wastewater.
“Our old plant was a trickling filter plant and it’s really old technology,” Perryville Public Works Director Jeff Layton said. “Most cities that have them are trying to replace them now and it doesn’t meet the current need. We were having trouble meeting the current limits of pollutants in the wastewater and would have had more trouble in the future. The Missouri Department of Natural Resources has changed its discharge limits for different metals and things found in wastewater treatment plants. When they tightened up these regulations the old plants were never built to handle that.”
The new facility is still located at the same location on Hidden Valley Lane and it still uses the same lab for sludge.
“That part was still fine for sludge handling,” Layton said. “We repurposed that and are still using it. As far as extracting the pollutants out of the wastewater, that is all done at the new facility.”

The new plant is rated for 2.5 MGD (millions of gallons per day) and a peak flow of 9 MGD.
The project had zero injuries on site and zero monetary change orders during the length of the build.
“Things were not too easy to get thanks to the challenges of COVID-19. It took a little longer than we hoped that it would,” said Paul Findlay Jr. of Robinson Industrial, “It will serve people for a long time.”
The plant has the capabilities to be expanded over time, once it is needed.
“The Oxidation Ditch can have another ring added to it to double the size,” Buerck said. “The community should be served well and that helps us add houses and industry and commercial buildings, which only makes Perryville better.”
In the two months that the city has been running the new plant things have run smoothly.
“It’s excellent,” Layton said. “The effluent that is coming out is five times cleaner than before,” Layton said. “The air has barely any smell at all. Just the way the process works, it breaks things down quickly so there is barely any smell. It is a good environmental process that has the capability to take anything we are throwing at it right now.”