Tenants in the Crossroads Industrial Park are about to get a much-needed break.

Earlier this month the Lathrop City Council voted to decrease the sewer rates that are currently paid by tenants such as Home Depot, Tesla, and In-N-Out Burger – rates that were significantly higher than other similar properties because of the extreme inefficiency of the wastewater treatment plant that served the area.

With the completion of the Lathrop Consolidated Treatment Facility taking some of the burden off the aging plant at Crossroads, the need for its continued usage has diminished and with Crossroads businesses already paying their portion for the construction of the new and efficient facility, the need to continue charging the exorbitant rates was no longer present.

The plant that originally served the area is now being decommissioned.

And the savings will be significant – the latest in a string of cost-savings measures that the city has implemented for the properties in a bid to retain tenants and attract new ones.

In 2015 the city sold a series of bonds to speed up the decommissioning of the plant that effectively cut the sewer bills for tenants in the Crossroads Industrial Park in half – saving up to $600,000 annually – and the proposal that was approved by the council last week will cut the remaining amount by a third.

According to the staff report, the biggest savings will come from the monthly non-resident meter charge which was set at $1.041.60 and dropped to $520.80 when the treatment plants consolidated. With the council’s action on the matter, the $520.80 will drop to only $9.50-a-month.

Tenants with low strength and medium-low strength sewer connections will see their rates go down slightly while medium, medium-high, and high strength connections will see a slight increase under the approved proposal. Industrial strength connections will pay the same amount that they have since the consolidation went into effect - $18.47 per 1,000 gallons discharged, or roughly half of what was being paid before the decommissioning process started.

The plant was constructed in 1993 solely to serve the businesses that were located within the park’s borders and became more inefficient as time went on – especially with advancements in technology that were making it less cost-effective to operate as time went on.

The Lathrop Consolidated Treatment Facility, which is located on Christopher Way behind the Crossroads Industrial Park, currently has a capacity of 2.5 million gallons per day following an expansion that was completed in 2018. Because it is built in a modular fashion where capacity can be expanded based on demand, the size of the treatment plan can double, and it will still be below the maximum capacity of 6 million gallons per day. The plant is current set up to accommodate future growth in the River Islands, Mossdale, and Central Lathrop areas – all of which have paid to fund the expansion to guarantee that capacity will be available when needed.

To contact reporter Jason Campbell email jcampbell@mantecabulletin.com or call 209.249.3544.