FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FORT
MYERS, Fla. (March 12, 2002) – Lee County has received the go-ahead from the
Gateway Services District Board to ultimately purchase and operate Gateway’s
wastewater treatment plant – a move that will provide a much-needed wastewater
treatment system for the expansion of Southwest Florida International Airport
and growth in the surrounding airport area.
The
Gateway Services District – a statutory special-purpose district – provides
retail potable water and wastewater treatment services to the Gateway Community
east of Fort Myers. The district
will continue to purchase its water from Lee County Utilities and own and
maintain the district’s water and wastewater distribution systems.
The
county will purchase the wastewater treatment plant and the 47-acre site it sits
on for $4.8 million, and provide wholesale wastewater treatment services to the
district. The Gateway Wastewater
Treatment Plant has a capacity of one million gallons per day and currently is
processing about 300,000 gallons a day.
Ownership
of the plant and site will allow the county to connect Southwest Florida
International Airport into the system and provides the county with an existing
site to expand the plant in the future up to a capacity of five-or-six million
gallons per day. This keeps the
county from having to purchase a “raw” site and zone the property for the
construction and operation of a new wastewater treatment facility.
The airport currently is undergoing a $386-million expansion.
Southwest
Florida International Airport had been using a “package” treatment facility
to process its wastewater, but since 1998 has been under a consent order to
connect to a central system because the plant wasn’t meeting minimum standards
set by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.
The county’s Utilities Division serves 48,500 water and 33,600 sewer customers in portions of North, East and South Lee County. The county operates five wastewater-treatment plants – Fort Myers Beach, Fiesta Village, Waterway Estates, Highpoint and Pine Island – with a total of 10-million gallons of capacity per day, and five water-treatment plants – College Parkway, Corkscrew, Green Meadows, Olga and Waterway Estates – with a combined 26-million gallons of capacity per day. The Utilities Division has an annual operating budget of about $27 million.