Leveraging Innovation and Alternative Delivery to Achieve a Sustainable and Drought Resilient Water Supplies

The City of Santa Monica (City) is implementing several innovative water supply projects as part of its Sustainable Water Supply Program. The program will leverage alternative water supplies, including stormwater, dry weather urban runoff, concentrate waste stream, and municipal wastewater to provide a diverse, sustainable, and drought-resilient local water supply. Collectively, these alternative water supplies would reduce the City's reliance on imported water supplies and projected to meet over 90% of its water demands through local water resources. The City employed alternative delivery strategies for two, first of its kind projects in its Sustainable Water Supply Program. The first project used a Design-Build-Operate (DBO) delivery model for the City's $96 million potable reuse facility that features the first membrane bioreactor and cartridge filter to receive log reduction values for pathogen removal in potable reuse applications in California, first stormwater harvesting and direct injection project in California, and a completely underground facility at the City's Civic Center to minimize impacts to the community. The second project used a Progressive Design-Build (PDB) delivery to implement the first Flow Reversal Reverse Osmosis (FRRO) system in the United States that will achieve a recovery of 90% or greater. The PDB and DBO delivery method provided a collaborative environment where the City (owner), engineering designer, construction contractor, and operation team partnered together from day one of design through construction completion and transition to operations to tackle key project challenges together. The key project challenges included: deep excavation for an underground potable reuse facility located at the City's Civic Center (adjacent to a Court House, Child Learning Center, and Historic Bel Mar Park), balancing project risk and cost associated with new technology applications (e.g., MBR pathogen removal credits changed during project implementation and no previous full-scale performance track record for FRRO), addressing project funding and supply chain impacts due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and managing regulatory engagement through a progressive design process. The key advantages with using a PDB/DBO delivery method include pricing flexibility (e.g., adjust project scope to meet project budget), flexibility with equipment selection to meet operation preferences, identification of project risks and associated cost to mitigate risk up front, single point of contact, and performance guarantee for project delivery. As alternative delivery methods are still relatively new to the water/wastewater industry, several lessons learned were gained during delivery of the two projects. The lessons learned that will be covered in the presentation include: 1) Procurement of PDB/DBO team — setting project expectations up front and incorporating indicative cost estimate to qualification based selection, 2) Preconstruction phase — partnering early and often, proper QA/QC trumps project schedule, and negotiating a fair performance guarantee and guaranteed maximum price, 3) Construction phase — undefined project scope/condition resolution, and continued regulatory engagement as only 60% design was completed to begin construction. The presentation will summarize the owner/utility perspective of advantages and lessons learned during each phase of the PDB/DBO delivery process for two alternative water supply projects.