ROCHELLE — The City of Rochelle held a ribbon cutting ceremony Wednesday for its recently-completed wastewater plant improvement project. 

The total cost of the project was just over $7 million and it included upgrading headworks equipment, converting aeration to biological phosphorus removal, upgrading the anaerobic lagoon, adding an office administration building and the conversion of the plant’s lab.

Rochelle Municipal Utilities Superintendent Adam Lanning said the improvements will save time and keep RMU ahead of the curve with the Environmental Protection Agency. 

"The equipment we replaced would break down routinely,” Lanning said. “With these upgrades, we're spending a lot less time working on that stuff. The big part is the EPA regulations. With the evolving regulations, this will ensure that we'll continue meeting those regulations and not get behind.”

If EPA regulations are not met, the agency comes in and mandates upgrades. That’s why the improvements were made. If changes were mandated, RMU would have been building a new treatment plant, which would have cost 10s of millions of dollars, Lanning said. 

Lanning said the improvements ensure clean water and no financial impact to customers. 

“If there's somebody in the creek down the stream from our plant, they're not going to get sick,” Lanning said. “For the residents, we got a low-interest 20-year loan through IEPA with $2.1 million forgiven of that loan. We didn't have to raise the rates to pay for this upgrade. That's a big thing."

The project took around two-and-a-half years. The first year was permitting and design and construction took a year-and-a-half. 

The project won the American Public Works Association Project of the Year in recent months. 

"It feels great to have it done,” Lanning said. “It was a good one."