Mike Chandler walked to the edge of three large basins at the Confluence Park Water Reclamation Facility near St. George.
This is where the art of wastewater treatment happens, said the superintendent of the Ash Creek Special Service District, a local sewer authority.
“At the top of this main stairway is what we're affectionately calling the poop deck,” Chandler said, reciting an abbreviated name for the plant’s process, observation and operations platform. “We are sewer folks. … We can't take our jobs too seriously.”
It’s a light-hearted acronym for an urgent task: cleaning and reusing sewage to stretch Washington County’s limited water supply.
The basins are where a specialized cocktail of bacteria will soon get to work eating pollutants. It’s the first time this particular treatment process, developed in the Netherlands, will be put to work in Utah, Chandler said.
“All of that secret sauce is in how we control the biology and the environment that it lives in.”
Local leaders see wastewater recycling as crucial to Washington County’s survival. The Virgin River is essentially tapped out, droughts are becoming more common and the county is projected to add more than 84,000 new residents in the next two decades.
The Confluence Park plant will go online Feb. 9, Chandler said, more than two years after its construction began in the town of La Verkin. From there, it’ll send reclaimed water to lawns, parks and other green spaces in nearby communities such as Hurricane and Toquerville. Eventually, the plan is to store some of the output in Chief Toquer Reservoir, which will support the countywide water supply. That reservoir was originally planned to be completed by late 2025, but is now expected to finish in early 2027.
The plant is built to handle the area’s projected growth. Homes and businesses in this part of eastern Washington County use around a half million gallons of water a day, Chandler said, and the facility will be able to clean three times that much.
“That's what 20 years suggests, is that we will likely receive triple the flow that we have today.”
Recycling wastewater is fundamental to the Washington County Water Conservancy District’s 20-year plan. It counts on reuse to provide more than half of the additional water the county will need to support its growth into the early 2040s.
“We live in the desert here in Washington County,” said Morgan Drake, the district’s reuse program manager. “Water is a very precious resource, and it's too scarce to use it just once.”
Using the same water again makes the county more drought resilient, she said, compared to relying on unpredictable snowmelt from the Virgin River. As long as people shower, wash dishes and flush the toilet, there will always be wastewater to recycle.
The first phase of the county’s regional reuse system should be up and running by 2030, Drake said. That phase will clean sewage for reuse outdoors, freeing up Virgin River water currently sprayed on plants to go to residents’ faucets instead.
The system’s second phase is expected to be in place by the late 2030s or early 2040s, she said. Those projects will purify wastewater to even higher standards, allowing it to go directly back into the drinking water supply.
But all this comes with a steep price tag.
The project at Confluence Park has cost around $50 million. Altogether, Washington County’s future regional reuse system will be an estimated $1.6 billion.
As readily available water runs out, it gets increasingly costly to scrounge up additional supplies. And that conundrum is not unique to Washington County, Drake said.
“The cheap water is gone. It's been developed,” she said. “These projects are expensive, so having funding is really critical.”
That’s why the county looked for outside money, both state and federal. Around $200 billion dollars for the countywide system will come from a Utah state loan. And nearly half of the system’s $1.6 billion total is expected to come from federal grants and loans. Most of the money to pay back the loans will come from impact fees on new development.
One of the grants for the county system is $21.2 million from a Biden administration program that set aside $450 million nationwide specifically for wastewater recycling. In 2024, the federal government approved sending $308 million of that to five projects — four in California and the regional system in Washington County.
The Government Accountability Office, an independent federal watchdog, recently released a report assessing the grant program’s impact.
“Not only did Congress want to understand whether or not they followed the proper laws when standing up and issuing its grant programs,” said Cardell Johnson, a division director at the office. “But what they really wanted to know is, are these projects having any benefit to communities? Are they worth, essentially, the investment?”
The report found that wastewater recycling appears to offer benefits for local areas.
For one, Johnson said, it may lower customers’ water bills. That’s because importing water from far away, as some Western communities do, gets expensive. And reusing nearby water can be more cost-effective in the long term.
Recycling sewage also gives a city more control over its water, so local industry and development can rely on it for future planning. The government report says Washington County’s regional system expects to recycle 4.5 million gallons per day by 2029 and nearly 18 million gallons per day by 2037.
“When you look at the range of the benefits — environmental, economic — that seems quite impressive,” Johnson said. “I like to give the analogy, it's like creating an extra reservoir that never runs dry.”
The report said the federal grant program followed the proper processes, but it also spotted some hiccups.
Because the program was the first of its kind, it was slow to get off the ground. That was partially because the grantees needed to do a feasibility study before starting their projects, but the federal grant didn’t include money for that study.
Nearly two years after the grants were awarded, $71.5 million of the program’s money still has not gone out to the projects it approved. One reason for that, Johnson said, was the Trump administration.
“When the new administration came in January 2025, there was a hold put on a lot of different program spending and a lot of different grants,” he said. “Large-scale water recycling was one of those affected by it.”
The money has since been freed up, he said, but there appears to have been confusion about it being paused and unpaused over the past year. On top of that, the feds have not yet selected any additional projects to receive the program’s remaining $142 million.
The report recommends that the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the program, work with Congress to make sure similar efforts run more smoothly in the future.
“Congress can't fix what it doesn't know about,” Johnson said. “This is all to make sure that communities get the resources that they need so they can start receiving the benefits sooner than later.”
That may be especially timely now because Sens. John Curtis of Utah and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada recently introduced a bipartisan bill to extend the wastewater reuse grant program an extra five years through 2032.
