Salt Lake City Water Reclamation Facility

Salt Lake City spent $618 million replacing the only plant that treats its wastewater, and the job is now in commissioning. It’s the largest project the city’s Department of Public Utilities has ever run and the second-largest in the city’s history, behind only the airport rebuild.

The new facility holds the same 48 million gallons per day of treatment capacity as the one it replaces. Everything else changed.

Project Scope

A Sundt Construction and PCL joint venture delivered the work under a CM/GC contract, with AECOM as engineer. The plant adds advanced biological nutrient removal, and that’s the piece driving the price. Utah tightened nutrient discharge limits on receiving waters, and the old plant had no path to compliance without a rebuild. Alongside the treatment trains, the project includes a new solids dewatering facility, a chemical feed facility and a dedicated electrical substation with four standby generators.

Structural concrete alone ran to roughly $100 million, and the joint venture self-performed all of it. That’s an unusual call at this scale, and it’s the reason the schedule held. On a plant job, concrete placement sequencing controls everything downstream, and subcontracting it puts the critical path in someone else’s hands. The project passed two million work hours in 2025.

Seismic performance and odor control were both treated as design drivers rather than afterthoughts. The plant sits in a liquefaction-prone stretch of the Salt Lake Valley, and it’s close enough to housing that odor complaints would have become a political problem.

Why It Matters

Wastewater plants are the least visible piece of municipal infrastructure and the most expensive to defer. Salt Lake City’s old facility dated to an era of looser discharge standards and no seismic design requirements worth the name. Rebuilding in place, while keeping 48 MGD flowing the entire time, is the hard version of the job.

The funding structure is worth watching too. The city paired ratepayer revenue with a federal WIFIA loan, a model more municipalities are reaching for as nutrient limits tighten across the Mountain West and the bill for compliance arrives all at once.

Project Team & Details