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Tampa Bay Water, faced with dwindling water supplies and increasing water demand forthe more than two million people it serves, chose a Design-Build-Operate (DBO) projectdelivery for its new surface water plant.In March 2000, Tampa Bay Water signed a 15-year contract (plus a five-year extensionoption) with a DBO team to deliver the water plant. The management consulting andengineering firm R. W. Beck assisted Tampa Bay Water throughout the procurement,contract negotiations and commissioning of the plant. The plant began commercialoperation 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 cyclecost of approximately $169 million. R. W. Beck has estimated that the DBO alternativedelivery method utilized in this procurement will save Tampa Bay Water about $85million over the life of the contract as compared to a conventional delivery approach.This paper describes the valuable lessonslearned from this project that can beapplied to other Design-Build watertreatment plant projects. Design-Buildteams can apply the lessons learnedto their future proposals, evaluation ofproposals and application of the process.A summary of the lessons learned, aspresented in this paper from the TampaBay Surface Water Treatment Plant DBOexperience include the following:Cost modeling should be applied during evaluation of DBP proposals and ishelpful to understand and compare life cycle costs of a proposed facility;contract terms should include influent raw water quality terms that make the DBO Contractorresponsible for managing raw water condition,project review terms that required compliance with the original proposaland owner approval of project changes; andliability 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 forthe entire capacity of the facility; and,start-up, turnover and acceptance testing schedule during the start-upprocess, the consideration of a milestone for mechanical completion proceededby a contractual required run-in period would allow the DBO Contractor towork out operations prior to the acceptance test. Decoupling of chemical andelectrical efficiency from acceptance test requirement would allow the DBOcontractor to optimize the facility to achieve these results.

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Edition: Vol. - No. Published: 06/17/2004 Number of Pages: 7File Size: 1 file , 520 KB