Before any more development can happen along the Covington Way corridor sewers need to be built.
With the growth in downtown Covington, explained Soos Creek Water and Sewer District manager Ron Speer, it became clear the utility needed to upgrade as well as add to existing infrastructure in the city.
Soos Creek Water and Sewer provides service to more than 35 square miles and thousands of residents in Covington, Maple Valley and surrounding areas.
“There are developers interested in those areas (along Covington Way) but there’s just no sewer lines there at all,” Speer said. “There’s just not enough capacity right now.”
Covington City Manager Derek Matheson explained in an email that most of downtown is on sewer systems – Covington Way is not – and because the city’s 2009 downtown plan calls for a wide range of uses along the corridor such as retail, office, housing and light manufacturing just to name a few examples, that kind of development couldn’t happen.
“The lack of mains and the prohibitive cost to any one developer to install them, has severely hampered development and redevelopment there,” Matheson wrote. “The city was excited when the Soos Creek Water and Sewer District announced plans at a joint meeting with the Covington City Council last year to invest (millions of dollars) to install a lift station and mains along the corridor.”
Speer said the district is in the early planning stages and recently awarded a design contract for the lift station, a sewage collection station where raw sewage is sent by gravity pipelines en route to a sewage treatment plant. Additionally, Speer said, the process to design the bore that will go from the south side of state Route 18 to the north of Kent-Kangley Road is nearly complete.
That bore needs to be built before work can begin on the lift station.
Construction on the bore is expected to begin some time in the next six months, while the plan is to get the entire project complete by summer of 2014.
“The main thing was we had to figure out how to get from the other side of (SR) 18 to the Calhoun pit,” Speer said. “We’ve got most of that worked out. We’ll be asking for proposals on the design of the gravity lines. We hope to have the proposals out for that by the middle of next year.”
Ultimately, Speer said, once the project is complete developers will know the capacity is available in the sewage system to handle whatever they want to build.
That is also an exciting prospect for Covington, Matheson said.
“This will greatly increase the likelihood of development and redevelopment of the corridor, which includes some very desirable parcels like the old United Rentals site at the north end,” Matheson wrote.
