Woodbury receives $12.5 million for new water plant design

Design for Woodbury's new water treatment plant will soon get underway thanks to a $12.5 million state grant.

The plant promises to be the largest project in the city's history, laying down some 14 miles of pipeline to route all of the city's water through the facility and back out to homes after it's been treated for per- and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) contamination. The plant isn't expected to be up and running until 2027.

The state grant money, which the City Council formally approved on Wednesday night, is a slice of the $850 million settlement reached in 2018 between the state of Minnesota and 3M, maker of the PFAS substances that have leaked into water supplies across the metro area and worldwide.

The grant will pay for all of the design work necessary for the plant and about a third of the design work necessary for the project's network of pipelines, said Jim Westerman, Woodbury's assistant public works director. Additional grant money will be sought to cover the rest.

The city is not expected to pay for the water treatment plant. The design work should take about 18 months, Westerman said. Construction is expected to begin soon after the design work wraps up.

The city's drinking water is pulled from the Prairie du Chien and Jordan aquifers through wells dug 475 to 550 feet deep. The city was notified in 2017 that five of its 19 wells were drawing water with higher than acceptable levels of PFAS. Four more wells were later found to have PFAS contamination as well.

The city built a temporary treatment plant in 2020 to fix water from six of the contaminated wells. The remaining three were closed.

PFAS contamination has emerged as a global problem as the chemical once thought of as a useful solution for a wide variety of manufactured products leached into water supplies around the world. The contamination may be found in food, drinking water, indoor dust, and some consumer products, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a review of the chemical that health effects associated with PFAS include cancer, liver damage, decreased fertility and increased risk of asthma and thyroid disease.