Public water owners have been the slowest adopters of alternative delivery in American construction. Lawrence, Kansas just gave the holdouts something to look at.
McCarthy Building Companies and engineer of record Black & Veatch have completed a $74.3 million modernization of the Kansas River Wastewater Treatment Plant. It was the city’s first wastewater project delivered under construction manager at risk.
Rebuilding a 1956 plant that couldn’t stop running
The plant opened in 1956 and treats roughly 8 million gallons a day, about 80% of Lawrence’s wastewater. It was the city’s only treatment plant until the Wakarusa River facility came online in 2018.
Four aeration basins were converted to biological nutrient removal to cut nitrogen and phosphorus discharged to the Kansas River. Chlorine disinfection gave way to ultraviolet. The plant got a new SCADA control facility for real-time monitoring plus a plant-wide electrical modernization.
All of it happened with the plant in service. McCarthy wrote more than 130 separate operational sequencing plans to keep discharge inside the NPDES permit during tie-ins, and logged over 252,000 field hours without a recordable incident. The full scope is in the Kansas River WWTP project listing.
What CMAR bought the city
“As the City’s first-ever CMAR wastewater project, this effort demonstrated how a collaborative delivery approach can create meaningful value for the client and all project partners by strengthening coordination, reducing risk, and supporting smart solutions from preconstruction through completion,” said Kerry Klausner, senior project director at McCarthy.
Strip out the phrasing and the mechanism is straightforward. On a plant retrofit, the expensive unknowns are constructability and sequencing, not design intent. Bringing the builder in during design lets those 130 sequencing plans get written before a price is locked, rather than discovered as change orders. That’s precisely the risk profile design-bid-build handles worst.
The demand behind the trend
Two forces are pushing this. Tightening NPDES nutrient limits are generating a long queue of retrofits at aging municipal plants, and almost none of them are clean-sheet designs. And large GCs are building dedicated water practices to meet it. McCarthy alone has a $168 million Mesa, Arizona water treatment job and a $185 million Torrance, California project running as a joint venture with Jacobs.
Federal policy is moving the same direction. WRDA 2026, which cleared House committee this week, directs the Army Corps to stand up an office with alternative delivery expertise. A first-time municipal CMAR user finishing clean is the reference contractors have been waiting to hand risk-averse owners.
Sources: Construction Dive, City of Lawrence.