To better plan to meet its future wastewater-treatment needs, Washington is seeking a consultant to conduct an assets-inventory assessment of its wastewater-collection system.

To that end, the city is asking engineering firms interested in providing services for the project to submit statements of qualifications by March 9. A grant from the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Water Infrastructure would help pay for the assessment. The project would compile all available information about the wastewater system — collection and treatment — in a comprehensive wastewater assessment management plan that address system needs, strategies and projects for meeting those needs and how to pay for implementing those strategies and projects.

Any contract awarded for this project is contingent upon funding being approved. Appropriating money for the assessment project could come during the City Council’s review of the city’s capital-improvements plan, which is scheduled for the council’s meeting Monday. The current CIP lists $6.6 million in proposed sewer-related projects in the next five fiscal years.

The focus of the assessment is to perform a critical analysis of the city’s gravity-collection sewer lines, pumping stations, force mains, treatment works and create a priority list of projects, among other scopes of work. As part of its work, the consultant would expand the city’s existing five-year sewer capital improvements plan into a 10-year plan, according to city document.

The city’s wastewater system also takes in wastewater from Chocowinity, which has an agreement with the city to treat its sewage.

Under North Carolina law, the city must begin planning to expand its wastewater-treatment system before it reaches 80-percent capacity and begin construction of improvements to an existing system or build a new system before the existing system reaches 90-percent capacity. The city’s existing treatment system has a capacity of 3.5 million gallons a day.

The city’s wastewater system includes approximately 74 miles of 6-inch to 24-inch gravity mains, 32 pumping stations with a network of 4-inch to 12-inch individual and common force mains to collect wastewater from nearly 5,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers for delivery to the city’s wastewater—treatment plant. That plant has a current capacity equal to 3.65 million gallons per day. After the wastewater passes through the plant, the highly treated effluent is discharged into the Tar-Pamlico River Basin. Residuals remaining after the treatment process are stabilized and disposed of by land application provided by contract sludge-disposal contractors.