SIOUX CENTER—Sioux Center’s plans for a new water tower won’t have a significant environmental impact, according to the Iowa State Revolving Fund environmental information document.

City utilities manager Murray Hulstein provided the Sioux Center City Council with the news at its Dec. 23 meeting, with the council approving the environmental information document.

The environmental information document is a required part for the city as it seeks a State Revolving Fund loan to help pay for the project.

Although the environmental document listed three project alternatives for the city’s plans to meet its need for more water, the first option remains the one the city will pursue.

The first option listed was the city’s preferred one, to build a new 172-foot-tall water tower south of Walmart by 2028 to better serve the community’s growing thirst for water.

Right now, the city hasn’t decided whether the water tower would have a capacity of 750,000 or 1 million gallons, but Hulstein believes it makes sense to go with the larger capacity tank.

The second option for the city to consider would have been to construct additional ground storage, but the document noted that elevated storage is preferential in the event of an emergency and having two elevated storage tanks provides redundancy when maintenance is required. For those reasons, this alternative was not considered.

The third option would be to take no action, which likewise wasn’t an option for the city given its projected water needs.

Sioux Center currently has two water towers operating. The north one, located at Fourth Avenue Northeast, just south of Pella Corp., was built in 1986 and has a capacity of 500,000 gallons of water. The west water tower, located at Heritage Village at the corner of Ninth Street Southwest and Second Avenue Southwest, was built in 1963 and has a capacity of 150,000 gallons of water.

In addition to the two water towers, the city has a third water storage facility: the water treatment plant, which can store up to 300,000 gallons of water.

Combined, the city has the ability to store as much as 950,000 gallons of water, which is almost as much as the city’s average daily use of nearly 1 million gallons.

With plans for design work to be done through the winter and the bidding process tackled in the spring, it is expected that construction could start next summer and could be completed either in the fall of 2027 or summer of 2028. The difference in completion dates comes down to the need for the right temperature range and humidity to paint the water tower.

Since this tower would be built 23 feet taller than the existing water towers, this should provide the city with improved water pressure, even in other parts of the city. However, to keep the new water tower from overflowing the others, equipment will need to be installed at a later date so that differently pressured zones can be created through the use of pumping headers or a booster station. In the meantime, the new water tower should not be completely filled.

Eventually, the north water tower should also be raised by adding to its tower so that it sits at the same elevation as the new south water tower.

Substation bid

In other business, the city council awarded the bid for switchgear component of the planned electrical generation substation project.

The city received three bids: Switchgear Power Systems of Winneconne, WI, at $715,725; Harold K. Scholz Company of Ralston, NE, at $887,000; Interstates of Sioux Center at $1,261,675. The city council approved the low bid from Switchgear Power Systems.

The engineer’s estimate for this was approximately $850,000, according to assistant utilities manager Adam Fedders.

The city’s substation project will add 12 megawatts of diesel generation and act as a standby generator that could partially power the town in emergency situations and when electricity is limited or very expensive on the entire on the Missouri River Energy Services grid.

The project is primarily funded by MRES.