Merced wonders how to woo ‘wet users’

Attracting industry that uses large amounts of water, or “wet users,” is high on the priority list of the City Council, so the city is working on a plan to get those businesses to call the water-strapped city home.

Common wet users include food or dairy processors, industries that could be a good fit for Merced, which sits near the center of the agriculture-based county. Food production also offers the kinds of jobs that many people in Merced can do.

To accommodate wet users, leaders say, the city needs a plan for what they call “pretreatment,” which could be anything from a grease trap in a restaurant to a business’s practice of hauling away waste from a processing plant.

Councilman Josh Pedrozo said coming up with a wet-user solution should help Merced bring jobs. “This is something I’ve been talking about for quite some time and something I think would really make us competitive,” he said.

Businesses that use large amounts of water need to pretreat the water as a way of taking some of the burden off of the city’s wastewater treatment plant.

Frank Quintero, the city’s director of economic development, said the city recently missed out on companies that want to expand. “Many (cities) have the sites, many have the labor, but if you don’t have the water for processing and wastewater to treat and for discharging, you’re quickly out of the game,” he said.

Food processors generally look for a parcel of 25 or more acres, he said. The city has identified five sites that staff is marketing to wet users.

Quintero said developing a plan and making changes to water-use fees are important now because food processing is on the rise.

Trying to ease up on the rates could be an economic incentive as large industrial processors can rack up significant water treatment fees.

A plant with a flow of more than 250,000 gallons a day can be charged $1 million or more a year in fees, according to Michael Wegley, the director of water resources in Merced.

He said some of the ideas for attracting business are offering lower rates or setting up payment plans to make paying the water bill easier on companies.

Another idea is for the city to own and operate pretreatment equipment used by processors. Or the city could outsource pretreatment to a private company.

Councilman Noah Lor said the incentives offered to new industry should fit on a sliding scale that measures the number of jobs and how much workers earn.

City staff said lowering the rates or setting up payment plans are the fastest to implement and easiest to sell to developers, but they do not increase the capacity that the city’s wastewater treatment plant can handle. So some combination of ideas may be necessary.

With or without new industry, officials said the city will need to increase its wastewater capacity enough to handle a population of about 120,000. The city’s master plan predicts that the population will reach 169,000 in 2030.

The council has not made any formal decisions on which plan or combination of plans to pursue but asked staff members to bring their ideas to council meetings in the coming months for more discussion.

This story was originally published January 9, 2015 at 5:37 PM with the headline "Merced wonders how to woo ‘wet users’."