29 Jun Let it Flow!

Fresno Residents Receive Water From New Treatment Facility

After more than two years of construction, the City of Fresno’s (City) new Southeast Surface Water Treatment Facility (SESWTF) is now distributing water to Fresno homes and businesses.

The SESWTF, the cornerstone of the City’s $429 million water infrastructure improvement program called Recharge Fresno, is a new facility that treats surface water to drinking water standards and enables diversification of the City’s water supply. Over the next several weeks, the facility will ramp up to a capacity of 54 million gallons per day with an ultimate capacity of 80 million gallons per day. The facility is fed with surface water from the Kings River through a newly constructed 13-mile-long Kings River Pipeline. Historically, the City relied predominantly on groundwater for drinking water supplies, but the Recharge Fresno program allows for conjunctive use with surface water and groundwater. The SESWTF will ultimately provide an additional 72,000 acre-feet per year of treated water for use by residential and commercial customers throughout the City.

K&A has been working with the City on its Recharge Fresno program since its inception in 2014. Work has included planning and implementation of a public participation process during the City’s water rate setting process, public meeting and special event planning, program branding, informational materials development, website development and graphic design, strategic outreach and communication to businesses and residents during project design and integration in the project teams during construction for full outreach services. The outreach team also supported the City’s Communications Department in media outreach during key project milestones.

Over the last several months, the K&A team has been notifying ratepayers, businesses, community groups and the media about what to expect during the water supply transition as Fresno residents and businesses begin getting water from the SESWTF. These notifications were sent to every ratepayer in the City (more than 100,000 homes), businesses who use water in unique ways (such as breweries, aquariums and medical facilities) and included a handful of in-depth briefings and facility tours for local print, TV and radio stations. This outreach push culminated with three community meetings during the week of April 23 that included substantive discussion with community members. Because of the highly-technical nature of the information, our creative team designed a variety of materials, including posters, fact sheets, project maps, infographics and animated videos to help tell the story.

These maps show the distribution of groundwater and surface water throughout the City of Fresno – before the SESWTF and after the SESWTF.

As the City of Fresno completes the major projects in the Recharge Fresno program in 2018 and 2019, K&A will continue to support the City’s outreach efforts, including the planning of a Recharge Fresno completion event. To learn more about the Recharge Fresno program, visit www.rechargefresno.com. There you can view the SESWTF construction cameras where you can see a time-lapse of the last two years of construction!