Southeast Treatment Plant Nutrient Reduction Project, San Francisco, California

San Francisco’s biggest wastewater plant is getting a new heart, and it has to keep beating during the surgery. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission picked a 50/50 joint venture of PCL Construction and Jacobs as progressive design-builder for the Southeast Treatment Plant Nutrient Reduction Project, and both firms announced the award on Oct. 28, 2026. ENR puts the overall budget at $1.45 billion, with roughly $600 million of that in direct construction cost.

The Southeast plant in the Bayview handles nearly 80% of the city’s combined wastewater and stormwater. It’s 75 years old and rated at 84.5 million gallons per day. It’s also one of 40 Bay Area municipal plants that have to hit nutrient discharge targets under the regional water board’s 2024 nutrient watershed permit.

Project Scope

The work centers on nitrogen. The team will retrofit the plant’s existing high-purity oxygen activated sludge system to produce densified activated sludge, build a new biological nutrient removal system and modify the existing aeration basins, according to ENR. Jacobs Engineering, Hazen and Stantec are handling design.

The JV’s contract is worth $192.8 million over 13 years, and the commission approved it in February. Four of those years are preconstruction. That’s where progressive design-build earns its keep: PCL says the team will compare several treatment technologies with the owner before locking a solution. A CEQA review starts once that work defines the scope, and construction can’t be authorized until the review is done and the commission signs off. PCL expects construction to wrap in 2034.

The pick was close. Jacobs/PCL beat a Sundt and Carollo Engineers team by 4.4 points out of 1,037.25 in a best-value scoring. Sundt/Carollo had the better price score, but Jacobs/PCL won on technical and social-impact factors. The city denied Sundt/Carollo’s protest in January.

Why It Matters

This is the largest single bet on nutrient removal any Bay Area utility has made, and it won’t be the last. Thirty-nine other plants face the same permit, and most of them run older activated sludge trains that weren’t built to strip nitrogen. Whatever process San Francisco lands on after four years of preconstruction will get studied closely around the bay.

It’s also a big piece of a much bigger program. The SFPUC is spending about $5 billion to modernize the Southeast plant, including a $2.3 billion biosolids job that a MWH and Webcor joint venture has run as CMAR since 2017. PCL is already delivering two other design-build projects for the commission: the new Treasure Island Water Resource Recovery Facility and a biogas project at the Southeast plant.

The hard constraint is the same one every plant upgrade faces. The SFPUC’s Stephen Robinson called it remaking “the heart of San Francisco’s largest treatment plant while that plant continues to operate.” Sequencing basin outages around wet-weather flows will decide whether 2034 holds.

Project Team & Details