13 min· water· building
Power, control, signal: three small water awards and the record before them
Three small electrical and control awards in this week's water news, a substation, a SCADA loan and a telemetry grant, and the public record that named each need years before the money came. Only one of them was in a capital plan.
Washington's Public Works Board gave $214 million to 65 local governments on October 2. Four days later, Grand Rapids, Michigan approved a $1.75 million contract to replace a substation at its wastewater plant. Those were the two headlines in my feed this week.
I want to look at three small electrical and control awards in that news, two from Washington's Public Works Board and one from Grand Rapids, not the biggest ones:
- Power. Grand Rapids: $1,748,800 to replace the North Primary substation at its Water Resource Recovery Facility.
- Control. Samish Water District, Washington: a $1,676,104 state loan for a telemetry and SCADA system upgrade.
- Signal. Yakima County, Washington: $368,000 for telemetry upgrades on its Terrace Heights water system.
Together they come to about $3.8 million (derived). The two Washington awards are about $2.0 million, under 1% of the state total (derived). All three fix the electrical and control layer, the part of a water or sewer system that stops the system working when it fails. And in all three, the need was written down in the public domain long before the award.
What surprised me is where. Grand Rapids wrote it in its capital plan. Yakima County pointed to it in a water system plan seven years ago, and its latest capital plan still has no line for it. Samish raised it in board minutes at least twelve years ago, and the capital table in the only plan on its website has no line for it either. Same kind of project, three different documents.
I believe that is the lesson. The award is the last public step, not the first. If you work for a utility, the earlier documents are where readers will look for your reasoning. If you sell to utilities, they are where you should have been reading, and the capital plan is only one of them.
1. Power: Grand Rapids, one substation, four capital books
The award. On October 6, according to a summary of that day's city committee meetings, the committees approved a contract for the North Primary substation at the wastewater plant, 1300 Market Ave SW. I have not seen the final commission vote. The stated amount is $1,748,800, with a not-to-exceed total of $2,141,755, paid from the sewer system fund. The engineer's estimate on the bid listing was $1,753,986.
The work is plain. Demolish the old unit substation, panelboard and transformer. Install new ones. Run NETA acceptance testing and the short-circuit, coordination and arc-flash studies. At the August 26 prebid meeting, nobody could confirm the rating of the old monorail hoist, so bidders were told to roll the new equipment in by removing a curb and guardrail. Substantial completion is October 29, 2027.
The record before it. I went back through the city's published capital plan books. Here is what they say.
| When | What the record shows | Status |
|---|---|---|
| FY2024 book | North Primary not listed; other electrical lines only | Not listed |
| FY2025 book | $1.6M planned for FY2026; the book calls the substation 49 years old | Plan |
| FY2026 book | $1.6M adopted, cash from the Sewer Capital fund | Budgeted |
| FY2027 prelim | No longer listed; already appropriated | Not listed |
| Aug 26, 2026 | Prebid meeting, bid 25087 | Out to bid |
| Sep 15, 2026 | Bids due; engineer's estimate $1,753,986 | Out to bid |
| Oct 6, 2026 | Contract approved, $1,748,800; not-to-exceed $2,141,755 | Approved |
- The FY2024 book has no line for it. It shows other electrical lines, among them the plant's motor control center (MCC) replacements and a medium-voltage cable line.
- The FY2025 book adds it as a temporary project, TEMP25044: $1.6 million in fiscal 2026, cash from the sewage disposal fund (the later book and the award name it the sewer capital and sewer system fund). The scope reads: "Replacement of 49 year old primary power substation and feeder breakers that are beginning to have instrumentation failure." The need: "Electrical equipment is well past end of life and risk of failure rises with age." Under alternatives it says "None" (p. 164).
- The FY2026 book gives it a permanent number, 590226024, and adopts the same $1.6 million (p. 150). The budget highlights list it by name.
- The FY2027 preliminary plan no longer lists it. My reading is that the money was appropriated in fiscal 2026 and carried forward, but that is an inference, not something the book says.
So the project sat in public capital books for about two years before the bid, with its scope, fund and amount unchanged. Nothing about it was hidden. It was just not news.
What moved. The plan held. The price did not, quite.
The contract is 9.3% above the $1.6 million in both capital books, and the engineer's estimate was 9.6% above it (both derived). The contract came in right at the estimate. The gap between the contract and the not-to-exceed figure is $392,955 (derived), about 22% of the contract. A contingency allowance would explain it, but I have not read the committee item, and the public summaries do not say. That is a question for the city, not a finding.
The schedule moved too. The capital book planned the work from July 2025 to June 2026. Bids were due September 15, 2026, about three months after the planned end date (derived).
What is listed next. This is the part a reader of only the award would miss. The same books carry two more primary substations: South Blower at the plant and MAPS at a pump station across town.
| Substation | FY2025 book | FY2026 book | FY2027 prelim |
|---|---|---|---|
| North Primary | FY2026 | FY2026 | awarded Oct 2026 |
| MAPS | FY2028 | FY2028 | FY2028 |
| South Blower | FY2028 | FY2029 | FY2030 |
The MAPS primary substation has held at fiscal 2028 across three editions, $1.6 million, now split into $200,000 and $1.4 million. The South Blower primary substation has moved from fiscal 2028 to 2029 to 2030 in three editions, also at $1.6 million. One stays put. One keeps sliding. Both are similar in scope to the one just awarded: transformers and feeder breakers.
There is a larger point in the FY2026 book. Take just the three primary substations, two MCC and distribution lines, and the two SCADA lines, and they add up to about $10.45 million over five years (derived), including the full $4 million SCADA project shared with the water system. The book's other electrical lines, such as medium-voltage and underground primary cable, PLC upgrades and relays, would take it to roughly $15 million.
The biggest single item is a $4 million SCADA improvement shared by the water and sewer systems, larger than any of the substations. The book's reason is direct: "After three assessments of the system the SCADA network for both utilities was found to be unable to meet operational and regulatory compliance including cyber security, EPA, and homeland security requirements" (p. 14). It adds that biodigestion and phosphorus recovery "cannot run without the SCADA system."
That sentence is the bridge to the other two awards: SCADA at Samish, which I'm calling control, and telemetry in Yakima County, which I'm calling signal.
2. Control: Samish Water District, a need that lived in the minutes
The award. On the state's FY2027 construction list, Samish Water District received a $1,676,104 loan, no grant, for a "Telemetry and SCADA System Upgrade." It scored 69.70, above the funding line. The Public Works Board's matrix calls it telemetry and SCADA.
Despite its name, Samish is a sewer district. The state auditor's most recent report says it serves about 470 residential and 30 commercial customers around Lake Samish, with sewage carried to Burlington for treatment, and that its 2023 revenue was $1,256,813. The loan is about 1.3 times a year of the district's revenue (derived). For a utility this size, that is a real decision.
The record before it. The district's 2013 Comprehensive Sewer Plan, prepared by Wilson Engineering, describes the system: in 2002 "the District's existing pump control system was replaced with a new remote communications system and SCADA reporting and data recording system," with a cellular remote telemetry unit at each pump station and alarms sent by email or text (pp. 2-9 to 2-10). The plan's capital improvement table (Exhibit J) lists a $950,000 pump station upgrade, a $40,000 backup generator, sludge and force main monitoring and line repairs. It has no SCADA or communications line, although the plan's text says "future anticipated SCADA reporting upgrades are discussed" (section 2.1.4).
The need shows up more directly in the board minutes, which are posted from January 2014:
- June 2014: the manager told the board that "the Districts SCADA system which is 10 years old will need to be replaced at budget time."
- March 2015: the district was "in the process of replacing the Scada Modems at all Lift Stations."
- December 2016: "a breach in the Verizon Wireless Modems at 14 lift stations" ran up about $1,500 in overage charges.
- February 2018: a January 20 power outage caused "the loss of communications from the Office SCADA System to the Pump Stations." The minutes record it back online on January 26.
The same minutes show the district watching state money. In March 2018 the board discussed free Public Works Board training, and in August 2019 the commissioners discussed the board's recap of loan applicant scores. In December 2025, a district resolution on lake testing still called SCADA "the primary tool for monitoring sewer system performance."
So the need was stated at least twelve years before the award, as far back as the posted minutes go, and patched along the way (the modems in 2015, an update in 2017). The capital table in the one plan on the district's website has no line for it. I can't tell from the record whether the 2026 project answers exactly the need raised in 2014. What I don't know is how the 2026 application was decided. The posted minutes stop around 2020, and the site has no budgets, so I could not find the board action that authorized it.
3. Signal: Yakima County, a need in the plan but not the capital program
The award. Yakima County received $184,000 as a loan and $184,000 as a grant for "Terrace Heights Water System Telemetry Upgrades." It is listed as severely distressed, and it scored 66.30, tied with three other projects for the lowest funded score in the round.
The same county asked for $3,124,000 for "Project SMART Water (System Modernization, Automation, Redundancy, & Transmission)." That scored 65.00 and was not funded.
| Application | Score | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Samish Water District: telemetry and SCADA, $1.68M | 69.70 | Funded |
| Yakima County: Terrace Heights telemetry, $368K | 66.30 | Funded, lowest score funded |
| Highest-scoring application not funded | 66.00 | Not funded |
| Yakima County: Project SMART Water, $3.12M asked | 65.00 | Not funded |
The lowest funded score was 66.30 and the highest unfunded score was 66.00. The small telemetry project got in at the line. The larger automation project scored 1.3 points below the lowest funded score (derived).
The record before it. The county's Terrace Heights Water System Plan, August 2019, is specific about the telemetry. It "was installed in 1994," with a microcomputer at the courthouse and remote units at the wells and booster station. When an alarm is not acknowledged, "the microcomputer will dial from a list of telephone numbers and announce the alarms over the telephone" (page 17). Pressures in three zones "are not monitored by the telemetry system," so "there is no way to know if a valve has malfunctioned," though the plan adds that monitoring them would be expensive (page 13). And: "Loss of the telemetry system requires that all of the wells be operated manually." The plan goes on to say the system can generally be repaired quickly, with spare radios, power supplies, RTUs and a backup computer on hand (page 90).
The plan never says outright that the telemetry needs replacing. But one clause reads "When the new telemetry system is installed" (page 89), and my reading is that the county expected a replacement in 2019. Neither the plan's 2018 to 2026 improvement schedule (Table 10-2) nor the six-year capital program in its executive summary, about $2.0 million, has a telemetry line. Telemetry appears only inside a developer-funded storage tank.
The county's 2026 to 2031 utilities capital plan, updated October 30, 2025, tells the same story. Terrace Heights has funded lines for tower rehabilitation ($610,000), booster pump drives ($600,000 over two years) and a standby generator ($250,000). It has no telemetry line. And Project SMART Water does not appear by that name in any county document I found, though two unfunded lines, a $3.0 million well and a $600,000 waterline, may overlap with its redundancy and transmission parts.
For scale, the county budgeted $2,643,496 for Terrace Heights water in 2025. The $368,000 award is about 14% of a year's spending (derived). I did not find the county commissioners' action on the application or the loan, so I have not traced how it was authorized.
What links the three
First, the need came years before the money, in different places. Grand Rapids put it in its capital plan about two years ahead. Yakima County pointed to it in a 2019 system plan, seven years ahead, but not in its capital program. Samish raised it in minutes by 2014, at least twelve years ahead. If you read only capital plans, you would have found one of the three.
Second, the equipment was old by any measure. A substation the city called 49 years old in 2024. A telemetry system from 1994 that announces alarms by phone. A SCADA system installed in 2002 (the 2014 minutes call it 10 years old) whose manager told the board in 2014 that it needed replacing. None of this is news inside those utilities. It is also the layer that keeps treatment running, and as the Grand Rapids book says, the one that has to meet cybersecurity requirements.
Third, state money paid for work no capital plan I found carried. Grand Rapids paid cash from its sewer fund. The two Washington utilities applied to the state for work I could not find in a published capital plan: Samish has none posted, and Yakima County's has no line for the Terrace Heights telemetry. That is not a criticism. Small utilities fund what they can from reserves and apply for the rest when a window opens.
Fourth, the next item is usually already on the page. Grand Rapids lists two more substations, one of them slipping. Yakima County has a $3.1 million automation request that just missed. Samish's minutes will show how the new system performs.
What this means for utility staff
The people who keep these records are answering the same questions over and over: what is this, is it new, did it get more expensive, has anyone decided? A few habits make that easier.
- If a system plan or the minutes say a control system needs replacing, give it a line in the capital plan, even unfunded. A line is the first place most readers look.
- Keep the scope and need language specific. Grand Rapids' "49 year old" and "instrumentation failure" say more in one sentence than a page of justification.
- When a project moves a year, or an award differs from the plan, write down why next to it.
What this means for vendors
Relationships matter in this market, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. They are one tool in the toolkit. The question is where you spend them, and the public record is a good way to decide.
- Read more than the capital plan. One of these three needs was in a capital plan, one in a system plan, one in board minutes.
- Read the unfunded list. It is a list of needs that have been written down, scored and not yet paid for.
- Watch the electrical and control work. Each project is small and easy to miss, and this kind of work rarely makes the news until it fails.
Projects / Harrow Bend Water Works / Electrical
Signals / Power and controlsThat is the reason we built AquaIntel around public documents: the record before the award.