B 1.0
Treatment facilities
New water and wastewater treatment structures and process systems, from excavation and cast-in-place concrete through mechanical installation, commissioning and operator training.
W/SS, Water and sewer Typical span 9–24 months
A treatment plant is not a building with equipment in it. It is a process, and the concrete, the pipe and the electrical exist to hold that process in a particular shape and keep it there for thirty years.
That changes what construction quality means. A wall that is dimensionally perfect and leaks is a failure. Water-retaining concrete has its own rules for mix, placement, joint detailing, curing and hydrostatic testing, and the difference between a structure that passes its leakage test first time and one that needs remedial injection is decided at the placement, not at the test.
The second thing that changes is who the building is for. The audience is not a developer, it is an operator who will live with the plant every day for decades. Valve access, clearances for pulling a pump, where a hose bib is, whether a walkway is usable in February — those are the things an operator judges a plant by, and they are worth raising during construction rather than discovering at startup.
And on almost every project, part of the new facility has to be tied into a plant that is already running. That part is covered on the retrofit page, and it is usually the hard half.
Define these before a proposal
- Process and capacity
- What the facility has to treat, to what standard, at what design flow, and what the permit actually requires.
- Existing plant interface
- Whether the new work ties into an operating facility, and if so, what carries the flow during the tie-in.
- Structural and hydraulic requirements
- Water-retaining design, joint detailing, leakage criteria and the hydrostatic testing regime.
- Delivery method
- Hard bid, CMAR or progressive design-build. It changes when the price is fixed and who carries the design risk.
- Commissioning and training
- Who writes the commissioning plan, who witnesses it, and how the owner's operators are trained on what they will run.
What you receive
Commissioning and startup records, O&M manuals, operator training
In the format the owner's records require, agreed at proposal stage rather than discovered at closeout. What happens at each stage is set out on the process page.
B 1.1 Pay items
What this scope costs, by the unit
Broken out the way an engineer's estimate breaks it out, so a district can assemble a realistic figure rather than guess at a lump sum. The full sheet is on the unit price page.
| Item | Description | Unit | Unit price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 05.10 | Structural excavation and shoring Including dewatering where required | CY | $28–$62 |
| 05.20 | Cast-in-place water-retaining concrete Forming, reinforcing, placing, finishing, curing | CY | $1,450–$2,600 |
| 05.30 | Waterstop and joint sealant PVC waterstop, hydrophilic strip, sealant | LF | $46–$95 |
| 05.40 | Hydrostatic leakage testing Fill, hold, measure, report | EA | $9,500–$34,000 |
| 06.10 | Process mechanical installation Owner- or contractor-furnished equipment set and aligned | LS | by scope |
| 06.20 | Process piping, ductile iron, 12–36″ Pipe, fittings, restraint, supports, testing | LF | $390–$1,250 |
| 07.10 | Aluminium handrail and grating Operator access, per code | LF | $145–$290 |
| 10.10 | Commissioning and functional testing Per system, with written record | EA | $6,500–$42,000 |
| 10.20 | Operator training On the systems delivered, with materials | DAY | $2,400–$4,800 |
Row bands are the APWA uniform colour code for what is in the pipe: W, Potable water potable water, SS, Sanitary sewer sanitary sewer, unbanded where a line covers both or neither. Units are LF linear foot, EA each, CY cubic yard, SY square yard, SF square foot, LS lump sum, MO month, DAY day.
Unit prices are USD planning ranges for the Colorado front range, exclude engineering, surveying, permitting, bonds, insurance, owner-furnished materials, easement and right-of-way costs and any applicable tax, and assume normal access and no undisclosed site conditions. They are published so a district can size a project before it spends money on design. They are planning ranges, not a bid. Reviewed October 2026. A price for your project comes from a bid or a proposal against a defined scope. See the disclaimer.
B 1.2 Questions
Questions about this scope
Specific to this scope. The general ones — bidding, bonding, insurance, weather days, pay applications, retainage — are on the FAQ page.
Why is water-retaining concrete priced so differently from ordinary structural concrete?
Because it is a different product. The mix is designed for low permeability rather than only for strength, the reinforcing is detailed for crack control rather than only for load, every joint needs a waterstop detail, the placement sequence is planned to control shrinkage, and the finished structure has to pass a hydrostatic leakage test before anybody accepts it. The difference in cost per cubic yard is real work, not a premium.
Do you install owner-furnished process equipment?
Routinely, and it is worth agreeing early exactly where the line falls. Owner-furnished equipment usually means we receive, store, set, align, grout, connect and assist with commissioning, while the manufacturer's representative does the startup and certifies it. Getting that split written down before the equipment arrives prevents most of the disputes it otherwise causes.
Who is responsible if the plant does not meet its permit at startup?
It depends entirely on why, and this is worth being precise about rather than reassuring. If a system was not built as designed, that is ours. If it was built as designed and the design does not perform, that is between the owner and the design engineer. The way you protect yourself from arguing about it later is functional and performance testing with written acceptance criteria agreed before startup, and we would rather have that argument at submittal stage than at commissioning.
How long does commissioning actually take?
Longer than anybody plans for. A realistic range on a plant project is four to eight weeks from first functional test to a facility the operators are running unaided, and that assumes the equipment arrived on time and the controls integrator is available. It is the phase most often compressed in a schedule and the phase where compression does the most damage, because the people who lose are the operators.
B 0.0 The other scopes
The rest of the schedule of work
Rebuilding a process train while the plant keeps meeting its permit. Bypass pumping, staged demolition, tie-ins scheduled at low flow, and a written procedure for every hour the plant is vulnerable.
- You receive
- Bypass plan, shutdown and tie-in procedures, as-built record
Gravity sewer, water mains and force mains in open cut and by trenchless methods, including the surface restoration that is what a resident actually sees when it is finished.
- You receive
- Pressure and leakage tests, CCTV inspection, record drawings
Wet wells, valve vaults, pumps, piping, electrical and controls, and the standby power that decides what happens to a collection system when the grid goes down.
- You receive
- Commissioning record, control narrative verification, O&M manuals
Cast-in-place water-retaining concrete, vaults, tanks, headworks, grading, drainage and restoration — the civil scope that everything mechanical is bolted to.
- You receive
- Concrete test records, hydrostatic testing, record drawings
Send the drawings, or describe the problem
Telephone with what the facility has to do, what it does now, and the date it has to be finished. We will tell you what has to be defined before anyone can price it, what carries the flow while the work happens, and what the sequence would have to look like.
RN Civil Construction, LLC · 6025 S Quebec St, Englewood, CO 80111