CAVE CREEK, AZ — The Phoenix City Council voted Wednesday to approve up to $300 million to renovate and bring its Cave Creek Reclamation Plant back online.
“There's multiple reasons why it's needed, but one of the reasons is we're running out of sewer capacity downstream,” said Nazario Prieto, the Phoenix Water Services department assistant director.
Currently, the plant is bypassed, and the wastewater is sent to a larger treatment facility in southwest Phoenix.
“So that's why we said we need to bring this back and essentially intercept the flows in the north, and keep them in the north,” Prieto said. “When we bring it back online, it creates a new water resource — what we ended up doing is we take that wastewater, we treat it to a very high quality, and we're going to be putting it back into the ground.”
Additionally, the plan is to renovate the plant to treat wastewater for drinking water — a plan laid out by The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) called the Advanced Water Purification program.
“We've also put some thought into the design so when we do go advanced purified water, we don't have to go back into the plant and make many renovations and add a lot of treatment processes,” Prieto said, adding that, “we're putting what we think will be needed now so that we minimize the expense later when we actually get to advanced purified water.”
The goal is to begin construction on the Cave Creek Reclamation plant later this month, and have it up and running by 2026. Before the plant can start treating wastewater for drinking, it will have to receive a permit from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) — which is currently finalizing the rules of the program.
”Once we have the rule draft, it will go out for formal stakeholder process, which is another review process where individuals and entities can review and comment on the rules to help us further refining it,” said Randall Matas, the deputy director for Water Quality. “Once that is done, there's some administrative processes and then the rule is finalized and will become effective shortly after that.”
Arizona already recycles water for other purposes, like irrigation and replenishing underground aquifers, but using it for drinking water will open a new chapter, and according to Matas will help sustain the growth of the state.
“This indeed is vital to Arizona to sustain the growth that we're seeing and make sure that we do have that assured supply of drinking water,” Matas said. “Most of the process will look similar to what you would expect to find in drinking water facilities currently. Really, the main difference with advanced purified water is the inclusion of additional technology that further treats the water, and incorporates things like real-time monitoring, and other things to ensure that that quality is maintained. So it's very similar treatment, just higher tech and with more safeguards.”
Prieto said he expects to start treating wastewater for drinking water sometime in 2027 or 2028.
