The Illinois EPA has approved giving Macomb a State Revolving Fund loan for construction of a new water plant.
“This is a go,” said Public Works Director Alice Ohrtmann.
She said the loan is for $37 million with $6 million in principal foregiveness,
The plant will be built at the northwest corner of Grant and Ward streets.
The city plans to have three wells drilled there. Ohrtmann hopes that work can be bid out early this fall.
The rest of the project will be bid out separately late this year or early in 2026.
Ohrtmann said the goal is to have the plant online by August 2027.
“I think that this is going to be a great thing for Macomb because we’re going to have a good, reliable water source, and it’s being designed with a look to the future of growth in the city, so that we’re prepared to be able to add more water capacity as the city grows,” she said.
The city currently gets the majority of its water from Spring Lake. The rest comes from a deep well. But Ohrtmann said Spring Lake is slowly filling in with silt and run-off from farm fields.
In addition, water quality regulations are getting more stringent.
“The process that we’re going to be using at the new plant pretty much takes everything out of the water. So much so that we have to add hardness back in and alkalinity back in because it comes out,” Ohrtmann said.
The current water plant is in Glenwood Park. She said portions of it date back at least a century, and it does not have redundancies built into its treatment systems.
“This new plant will have redundancies so that if one of the processes goes down, we’ve got spares. That’s a big deal,” Ohrtmann said.
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