SEATTLE — Building a pump station for Seattle’s massive new sewage and stormwater storage tunnel will suck up more money than expected and contribute to higher utility rates for residents in the coming years, officials say.
The Ballard pump station’s new price tag of nearly $190 million isn’t the main reason why Seattle Public Utilities needs to raise the city’s water, sewage, solid waste and drainage rates by 4.7% per year through 2030, officials told City Council members during a council committee meeting Wednesday.
Rate hikes projected for Seattle Public Utilities
In 2021, the Seattle City Council approved a Seattle Public Utilities plan with projected rate increases through 2026. The council is now considering a new plan with projected increases through 2030.
Source: Seattle Public Utilities (Reporting by Daniel Beekman, graphic by Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times)
But it’s a prominent example of the challenges currently squeezing the agency, which is under pressure to upgrade aging systems at a time when construction, borrowing and other costs have climbed. Not yet operational, the tunnel that the pump station will serve runs 2.7 miles from Wallingford to Ballard, project executive Keith Ward said during a recent tour of the subterranean tube, pointing into the echoing darkness.
Pending approval by the council, a new multiyear business plan proposed by Public Utilities would set rates on a path to $325 per month for a typical house and $187 for a typical apartment by 2030, up from $245 for a house and $142 for an apartment today. Seattle City Light provides electricity separately.
Breaking down your bill
Seattle Public Utilities services include wastewater, solid waste, water (billed every other month) and drainage (billed through property taxes). Here’s how the typical monthly cost for a house and an apartment would break down in 2025, based on rate increases proposed by SPU.
Source: Seattle Public Utilities (Reporting by Daniel Beekman, graphic by Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times)
Although Public Utilities and City Light are part of Seattle government, they’re mostly funded by ratepayers, rather than by the city’s deficit-plagued general fund. Public Utilities develops a new business plan every few years, and the City Council cements the actual rates annually, with discounts and emergency assistance available to lower-income ratepayers.
The new storage tunnel, pump station and conveyance pipes, now estimated to cost more than $700 million altogether, are part of a joint effort by Seattle and King County to stop sewage and stormwater from gushing into the Lake Washington Ship Canal during heavy rains, as required by consent decrees that officials signed with federal and state authorities in 2013.
In older Seattle neighborhoods, sewage from bathrooms and stormwater from street gutters drain through the same antiquated drainage sewer system. Downpours sometimes overwhelm those pipes and some of the polluted slop (about 10% sewage, 90% stormwater) gets spilled into the ship canal.
When up and running, the 19-foot-diameter tunnel — the same size as a light-rail tunnel — will collect up to 30 million gallons, and the pump station will route that liquid toward the county’s West Point Treatment Plant.
The tunnel and pump station should reduce environmentally harmful spills by more than 75 million gallons each year, Ward said, calling that “an investment in Puget Sound and our region.” Still, the megaproject has encountered a number of obstacles along the way, including COVID-related disruptions, a labor shortage, inflation in the construction sector and a giant boulder that damaged the project’s tunnel-boring machine.
The machine’s digging work, which wrapped up last June, took about 10 months longer than projected, and workers have yet to break ground on the pump station, partly because the city ran into bidding problems last year.
Seattle will pay more to build huge pump station for new sewage tunnel
The pump station in Ballard will cost $187 million, up from an earlier estimate of about $100 million. It will suck sewage and stormwater out of a 2.7-mile-long storage tunnel that the city recently constructed along the Lake Washington Ship Canal.
Sources: Seattle Public Utilities, King County, Esri (Reporting by Daniel Beekman, graphic by Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times)
That means the tunnel won’t be usable until 2027, about two years after Seattle and King County were supposed to be done, per their consent decrees.
They gained some breathing room Wednesday, as the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Washington State Department of Ecology announced revised agreements that include a 2027 completion date for the ship canal project. If approved by the County Council and City Council, the new agreements will give local officials more time to complete multiple sewer-spill reduction projects while also expanding some of them, a news release said, mentioning that climate change-charged rainstorms have grown in intensity since the consent decrees began in 2013.
Meanwhile, the ship canal project’s overall cost, pegged at $423 million in a 2014 planning estimate and $570 when tunneling began in 2021, is now estimated to land reach $710 million, officials revealed Wednesday.
That increase isn’t the primary driver of the rate hikes in Public Utilities’ new business plan, General Manager Andrew Lee said. The city is paying for about two-thirds of the project, while the county is covering about one-third. Had the project’s cost not swelled, the agency would be proposing 4.5% average annual rate hikes through 2030, as opposed to 4.7%, he said.
The agency’s last six-year business plan, approved in 2021, projected average annual rate hikes of 4.2%. The ship canal project’s cost has grown by about 25% since then. That’s not bad compared to many megaprojects, Lee said.
“I track these projects all across the country,” he said.
The Ballard pump station is largely responsible for the ship canal project’s most recent cost increase because, unlike the tunnel, it went out to bid in a tricky post-pandemic marketplace, said Ward, the Public Utilities project executive. Only one contractor bid on the station in 2023, submitting a sky-high $213 million proposal that led officials to hit pause.
The agency aims to start construction on the pump station later this year, and the basic design hasn’t changed too much since before the bidding process began, Ward said. The idea is for electrical equipment and cranes to be housed in a cylindrical tower above a giant drop shaft.
But officials could try to save some money by scaling back an artistic element, Ward said. Whereas the original design called for the tower to be wrapped in a 80-foot-tall steel lattice with shimmering LED effects, officials may decide to illuminate the lattice with less expensive lights below, he said.
