Tampa Bay Water, faced with dwindling water supplies and increasing water demand for
the more than two million people it serves, chose a Design-Build-Operate (DBO) project
delivery for its new surface water plant.
In March 2000, Tampa Bay Water signed a 15-year contract (plus a five-year extension
option) with a DBO team to deliver the water plant. The management consulting and
engineering firm R. W. Beck assisted Tampa Bay Water throughout the procurement,
contract negotiations and commissioning of the plant. The plant began commercial
operation on Jan. 15, 2003. The state-of-the-art water treatment plant is a 66-million-gallon-
per-day (mgd) facility with a capital cost of $89 million and an overall life cycle
cost of approximately $169 million. R. W. Beck has estimated that the DBO alternative
delivery method utilized in this procurement will save Tampa Bay Water about $85
million over the life of the contract as compared to a conventional delivery approach.
This paper describes the valuable lessons
learned from this project that can be
applied to other Design-Build water
treatment plant projects. Design-Build
teams can apply the lessons learned
to their future proposals, evaluation of
proposals and application of the process.
A summary of the lessons learned, as
presented in this paper from the Tampa
Bay Surface Water Treatment Plant DBO
experience include the following:
Cost modeling should be applied during evaluation of DBP proposals and is
helpful to understand and compare life cycle costs of a proposed facility;
contract terms should include
influent raw water quality terms that make the DBO Contractor
responsible for managing raw water condition,
project review terms that required compliance with the original proposal
and owner approval of project changes; and
liability responsibilities that clearly reflect balanced risk analysis;
conduct pilot testing to validate the proposed processes;
permitting should include the discharge of out of specification product water for
the entire capacity of the facility; and,
start-up, turnover and acceptance testing schedule during the start-up
process, the consideration of a milestone for mechanical completion proceeded
by a contractual required run-in period would allow the DBO Contractor to
work out operations prior to the acceptance test. Decoupling of chemical and
electrical efficiency from acceptance test requirement would allow the DBO
contractor to optimize the facility to achieve these results.
| Edition : | Vol. - No. |
| File Size : | 1
file
, 520 KB |
| Note : | This product is unavailable in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus |
| Number of Pages : | 7 |
| Published : | 06/17/2004 |
