$180M project is key to Pasco’s booming food industry jobs. Think peas, corn and butter

Pasco is betting big on food processing, again.

The city is preparing to invest $180 million to expand the water reuse facility that treats what it calls “process water” discharged by the food processors that drive the economy.

The process water reuse facility may not be sexy, but it is critical infrastructure that supports major employers such as Pasco Processing, Twin City Foods, Simplot and Reser’s Fine Foods.

Collectively, they employ 1,200 to 1,500 and support countless more jobs.

The investment will expand treatment capacity, which will allow Pasco to serve new and growing companies. The water will be:

• Treated to irrigate up to 2,000 additional acres of farm fields.

• Filtered to collect the nitrogen-rich solids, to be recycled as fertilizer.

• Used to capture dissolved natural gas, to be sold at market rates.

The project will be funded by fees paid by the plant’s users, as well as a grant from the state capital projects budget and potential federal grants.

The investment comes amid stunning growth in local food processing and agribusiness.

Reser’s recently opened a modern new plant and Darigold is building a $650 million dairy plant in north Pasco. The amount of process water that will need to be treated at the municipal plant is expected to double in the near future.

Unlike a wastewater treatment plant that treats municipal sewage, a process plant’s main job is to treat agricultural wastewater discharged by food processors.

“Basically right now we are processing almost a billion gallons of water a year in the existing facility. When the new facility is done we will more than double that, we will be putting in more than 2 billion gallons of water on our farm fields,” said Steve Worley, Pasco’s public works director.

Randy Hayden, executive director of the Port of Pasco, applauded the complex project and the move to capture useful products from the waste stream.

“You’re really seeing this new dynamic of what were previously considered waste products now becoming a valuable commodity because they can be converted into different forms of energy… It’s become a feed stock for other important forms of energy,” he said.

The existing facility can treat up to 6.5 million gallons of water a day during peak seasonal flow. With the expansion, the city will be able to process an additional 2 million gallons of water a day.

Price tag

The hefty expansion comes with a hefty price tag — and food processors will bear most of the cost.

Over the coming years, Pasco’s food processing businesses will pay millions to use the city’s treatment facility, mostly in capital costs and upgrades.

Last year, the five largest processors — Pasco Processing, Reser’s, Twin City Foods, Simplot and Grimmway — covered roughly $4.7 million for operations at the plant.

Darigold and Freeze Pack will begin contributing to the pool this year. And the city’s budget anticipates capital costs and existing debt services will boost the bill up to $9.5 million by the end of 2023.

Pending final costs for the facility and natural gas market prices, the city estimates that the seven processors will be responsible for $13.5 million annually.

The city is also looking at multiple federal and state grants to help cover project costs.

Tri-Cities lawmakers got $5.05 million earmarked in the Washington Legislature’s 2023-25 capital budget to fund the series of projects.

And the city submitted a $12 million request for Congressional Directed Spending to Washington Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell , as well as a $12 million request to U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Sunnyside, through the Community Project Funding program.

Agriculture focus

Pasco is in one of the most productive agricultural regions in the nation.

In 1995, the city built what was at the time a state-of-the-art process water reuse facility at 957 E. Foster Wells Road in an effort to attract more food processors to the area.

Stephen McFadden, Port of Pasco’s director of economic development and marketing, said it’s that existing municipal system that landed Pasco such big-time players, including Darigold and Reser’s.

“Being able to land-apply that water has helped ensure that that industry sector in an ag-centric county continues to thrive,” he said.

Project phases

The expansion will cover growth over the next 30 to 40 years, and is being done over four phases.

• Phase 1 is currently extending a potable water line and electrical power over to the facility.

• Phase 2 is under design and almost ready to go out for bid. It will see Pasco triple the volume of its winter storage ponds.

• Phase 3 is the largest and most costly group of projects at $122 million, and will see a major reinvention of the way Pasco treats and collects resources pumped into the process water facility through a method of industrial symbiosis.

• Phase 4 improvements will see $6.4 million worth of replacements and extensions to the irrigation line pumping treated water out to city-owned crop fields.

“This whole project is a really big deal,” said Mayor Pro Tem Craig Maloney at a recent meeting. “And it’s a huge price tag. These are numbers that are unusual for us to have to be looking at in terms of a single facility.”

“When you think about the original process water reuse facility and its success for the city, it was perhaps even a bigger risk to the city at the time at which that was built and agreed to. And the council was convinced at the time, ‘If they build it, they will come.’”

The city will make several industrial wastewater pretreatment improvements to increase capacity for future processors, as well as install a renewable natural gas plant at the site to collect a methane byproduct produced through the water-cleaning process.

Pasco estimates it will receive about $6 million annually in revenue from renewable natural gas sales once its expansion is online, and it will also benefit from a 30% investment tax credit on the facilities.

These funds will help offset Phase 3 costs that would otherwise be paid for by the processors.

Burnham RNG, an Arlington, Virginia-based energy company, will build and operate the renewable natural gas plant as well as the new city process water treatment facility.

The addition of a rotating algal biofilm system to the treatment process will allow the city to remove nitrogen-rich fertilizer to be sold to local farmers.