AWWA INF52156

The City of Portland's Bureau of Water Works (Bureau) has supplied domestic water to Portland-area residents since 1895. It is the largest supplier of domestic water in Oregon and supplies both retail and wholesale water to nearly 840,000 people. The Bureau faces a wide variety of challenges and uncertainties as it enters the new millennium. These uncertainties arise from three principal sources: current federal regulatory requirements and potential future changes that affect water quality standards, treatment, and the Endangered Species Act (ESA); decisions by current and potential wholesale customers about whether to obtain supply from Portland or elsewhere; and, decisions about where to obtain additional supply in the future and whether groundwater will be a basic component of the future supply or will be reserved only for emergencies. While the Regional Water Supply Plan (RWSP), completed in 1996, has provided the Bureau with a regional vision for the supply system, it did not specify how individual water suppliers would implement that vision or how transmission and major storage would be handled. In addition, the RWSP did not investigate what each regional supplier would need to do in order to maintain its existing system at a high level of reliability. With the RWSP as its reference, the Bureau undertook its own infrastructure master planning effort to develop a long-range, integrated approach to resolving the key issues that will materially affect the system over the next 50 years. This paper describes the Infrastructure Master Plan (IMP) which explores these challenges and charts alternative courses to meeting them during the next 50 years. The IMP is also intended to be used by the Water Bureau to guide its Capital Improvement Program (CIP) towards meeting the water system's short-term needs over the CIP's 10-year term by both identifying new projects and confirming the need for other previously identified projects. Includes 4 references, tables, figures.