The intricacy involved in constructing an entirely new water system, complete with 30 miles of pipeline, a water treatment plant and raw water facility has been over a decade in the making. But the sheer logistical nature of the project wouldn’t be possible without one of the most unique ownership structures in Pacific Northwest water.

With two cities and a water district each involved in a program of this scale, it made the project more complex than any other in the region.

“To make this work operationally is really unique,” says Dave Kraska, Willamette Water Supply Program director, considering “all the intergovernmental agreements we had to negotiate and execute.”

The success of the endeavor has led to the commission’s selection as ENR West’s 2025 Northwest Owner of the Year.

The Willamette Water Supply Program features 30 miles of seismically resilient large diameter pipeline as part of a new $1.6-billion water system.
Photo courtesy Willamette Water Supply Program

Balancing Act

The Willamette Water Supply Program features 30 miles of seismically resilient large diameter pipeline; a raw water facility to modify an existing river intake on the Willamette River in Wilsonville and associated site improvements; a water treatment plant in Sherwood with an initial capacity of 60 million gallons a day and an ultimate capacity of 120 mgd; and a new 15 mg water storage tank on Cooper Mountain with room to expand with an additional 15 mg tank.

The system features approximately 23 construction contracts for building the infrastructure. In addition, a variety of other services were contracted for construction and program management, engineering and support.

To make it go, the Tualatin Valley Water District is the managing agency, with the overall responsibility to ensure the project moves forward, but all decisions are vetted and coordinated with all entities. “None has decision-making power over the others,” Kraska says. “All decisions are by consensus.”

The project developed strong relationships with the local contracting community.
Photo courtesy Willamette Water Supply Program

In 2025, the program expects to finish the final piece of pipeline in Wilsonville, get near to completion on the water treatment plant and begin the commissioning process in order to deliver water to customers in mid-2026. It’s been a project with multiple decades of history, including a program office formed in 2015 and with construction starting in 2017.

Funded by the three entities, mainly through customer rate increases and new development fees, it takes “from the owner’s side ... a lot of political will, decision-making and stamina, bringing the money and rate increases, but it doesn’t happen without the expert guidance and counsel on the consultant side and our contractors to make this successful,” Kraska says, adding that the political will that started in 2013 hasn’t wavered and gives the staff the confidence to move forward.

The project costs rose $300 million near the end of 2021 due to supply chain impacts and resource pricing, but Kraska says finishing has always been the focus.

Breaking the individual contracts into smaller amounts made the work more attractive to local contractors.
Photo courtesy Willamette Water Supply Program

Relationship Building

Stantec’s Andre Tolme, Willamette Water Supply Program construction manager, says the key to keeping the project moving forward has been the commitment from leadership and owner agencies to successfully navigate multiple political environments, a global pandemic and a highly erratic construction material price escalation.

“Through it all, the leadership has remained committed to the project, and they have been flexible in allowing the program to make shifts as necessary in order to complete the program,” he says. “The leadership from the top has empowered everybody who has worked on this program to work as hard as they can on their individual contributions.”

Early on, the Willamette leadership learned from other multibillion-dollar projects about the importance of being an owner of choice and developing relationships in the local contracting community, especially in the relatively smaller market of Portland.

“It is not L.A, it is not even Seattle or San Francisco,” Kraska says. “We had to exhaust the contracting capacity for the area to build what we had to build.” And with plenty of other demands in the region—Intel alone does billions of dollars of work in Hillsboro—the project’s philosophy focused on timely fairness so that contractors knew they didn’t carry excess risk.

To build relationships, the program conducted outreach, engaged with contractor groups and was willing to modify projects and contracts after getting feedback. “We had good contractor participation in the bids,” Tolme says. “We knew the relationship with the contractors was really important.”

“The CM/GC model worked exactly as intended, bringing the owner, engineer and contractor together early to make informed decisions, reduce risk and deliver a high-quality project,” says Mark Bertolero, area manager for Kiewit Infrastructure West Co. “It was an honor to be part of a team that truly operated as one.”

The CM/GC delivery methods, which allowed Kiewit to contribute input on constructability, risk mitigation and cost-saving through value engineering was vital. “That level of integration and trust between owner, engineer and contractor was a big part of what drew us to the project,” Bertolero says. “Our experience working with the WWSP team has been outstanding. They’ve set the tone for what a strong owner-contractor partnership looks like: highly engaged, transparent and collaborative at every level. The relationships built here will have a lasting impact, and we’re proud to have been part of it.”

While contractors were eager to get involved in such a regionally significant project, the Willamette Water Supply Program broke up projects into $10-million to $50-million packages, a size local contractors found attractive.

During the first five years of operations, the teams worked together out of one project management office with “a lot of instant collaboration.” When the pandemic hit, the team already knew how to work together. “I don’t know if it would have gone as well if we had to start remotely,” Kraska says. “Starting face to face was critical to our success.”

A new 15-million-gallon water storage tank on Cooper Mountain includes room to expand with an additional 15 mg tank.
Photo courtesy Willamette Water Supply Program

Fostering Team Spirit

The project has required intense collaboration outside the scope of the work, including with major pipe suppliers to ensure the team could meet the timeline, which informed the project’s sequencing. The Willamette Water Supply Project also collaborated with multiple cities and counties to construct water lines concurrently in major road projects, saving money and minimizing public disruption.

Continuity across the roughly two dozen projects gave contractors security, Tolme says, from a consistent approach to inspection, construction management, safety and even the way questions would get answered. “[Contractors] don’t need to add extra money into a bid to cover those risks,” he says.

The logistical planning is one thing, but so is the system itself, designed to take raw water from one of Oregon’s largest rivers, pump it to a new water treatment plant to produce drinking water, store it at new facilitates on Cooper Mountain and then gravity-feed the water to customers in three service areas.

“This is a $1.6-billion project, and that already makes it unique,” Tolme says. “It is a program that has more than 20 individual construction projects in it, multiple owners and is delivered over 11 years. Those are all aspects that make it more unique.”

The trickiest part, Tolme says, is that the underground water transmission is akin to 30 miles of a 6-ft wall. That wall must fit with every other utility. “That made our alignment and working around all the other underground infrastructure very complex,” he says. “Finding the alignment through major city streets that was constructable, that minimized traffic disruptions and allowed the contractor to be efficient, those were the trickiest areas.”

This 6-ft wall had to go through rock and loose soils, under rivers, between businesses and around homes. Knowing what decision needed to be made and when was essential. Kraska says early decisions about alignment proved paramount in the success of the project. “There was a tremendous amount of effort put into staying on schedule,” he says. “The way you lose control of a budget it to lose control of a schedule.”

To save time and money, the road work and pipeline installation for the project were carried out concurrently.
Photo courtesy Willamette Water Supply Program

Seismic Concerns

The project goes through basalt rock and areas that will behave like Jello in a seismic event. That 6-ft wall needs to hold together, requiring a tremendous amount of geotechnical work. The materials used for corrosion protection and flexibility in the pipe were not typical and new to many contractors. The backfill details were different, and the welding specifications were unique.

That seismic focus also caused a major change on the project, moving the water treatment plant away from the shore of the Willamette River and the liquifiable soil—soil mixing and jet grouting shored up the area to ensure a reliable connection for the intake and raw water facility. The owners found a 100-acre area of all rock, moving the treatment plant seven miles to the north.

“It is the most complex and expensive part, so let’s make it as reliable as possible,” Kraska says. “We made the decision to move onto a rock site and feel good about that.”

Every piece of equipment that goes into the facility still must pass a physical shake table test to demonstrate individual components won’t fail under a seismic event.

Another puzzle included 30 miles of pipeline not built sequentially, requiring the team to embrace exactness so the entire line matched up. One of the more impressive single projects was a 2,000-ft-long, 7-ft internal diameter micro tunnel beneath the Tualatin River. In all, the project required about 25 tunnels to cross challenging areas.

Bertolero says the raw water facilities project offered the kind of technical and collaborative challenge the company welcomed. “With deep foundations, in-water construction and seismic upgrades across new and existing infrastructure,” he says, “it was a highly complex scope that demanded early contractor involvement and close coordination.”

A key success for the project occurred in the 1970s. Another was in the 1990s. The Tualatin Valley Water District acquired water rights to the Willamette River in the 1970s as part of long-range planning. Then, the agency partnered with the city of Wilsonville in the 1990s on an intake project. The original intake pipe was sized for this current project, and the 2002-built pump station included capacity for the future, which is being used now.

“Getting those water rights early was really the key to build this program,” Tolme says.

The team will spend 2025 focused on finishing construction and commissioning the system for mid-2026 delivery. “Every light switch, wire, pump, handrail, every element is brand new,” Kraska says. “We are doing all the best planning we can possibly do and at that first start-up there will be a lot to learn and work out to make it operational in a little more than a year from now.”

The team remains focused on that finish line. “It is really remarkable, and it isn’t successful without the support and guidance of the three partners agencies,” Kraska says. “There is some anxiety and excitement about the finish line coming up and all the new work coming to achieve our mission of delivering reliable, resilient high-quality clean water to hundreds of thousands of customers in the area.”