- December 8, 2025
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With a few weeks to spare, Sarasota County on Friday cut the ribbon on the Bee Ridge Advanced Wastewater Treatment Conversion and Expansion Project, a massive public works project designed to improve quality and capacity of wastewater collection and treatment.
The county has been under a consent order from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to convert the facility on Lorraine Lane, just north of Rothenbach Park, to an advanced wastewater treatment facility since 2019.
Five years and about $210 million later, county commissioners joined Director of Public Utilities Brooke Bailey and other dignitaries at the site for the ribbon-cutting Dec. 5. The deadline was Dec. 31.
Capacity of the new operation is up to 18 million gallons a day from 12 million, and the system reduced harmful nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus released into the reclaimed-water irrigation. Such nutrients can prompt algal blooms in Sarasota Bay's estuary system.
Bailey said not only is the revamped facility able to treat 50% more wastewater a day, it is now doing so on a smaller footprint. That will allow for further expansion as needed, though officials believe its current capacity to be effective for 20 years, she said. A similar project is underway in Venice, and there are plans for a third.
“Today’s ribbon-cutting marks an amazing achievement,’’ Bailey said at the event. “Over the last five years, our team has not only completed an upgrade to an 18-million-gallon treatment facility, but continued to run our pre-existing 12-million-gallons-a-day throughout the whole entire process.’’
The Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure awarded the design of the upgrade an Envision Gold Award. Commissioner Theresa Mast, who represents the district in which the facility sits, said she had taken a tour of the facility recently with Bailey and learned something about its standing in the world.
“She said there are several countries, not states, countries that have come to visit this project because of how forward-thinking it is,’’ Mast said, acknowledging the time span of construction traversed the epidemic and three tropical weather outbreaks in Sarasota County.
The project's technical scope required innovative approaches to engineering design and financing, which included a federal $105 million Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act low-interest loan.
Jeaneanne Gettle, a deputy regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said she saw some things at work inside the facility that she had never seen employed before. But she said the effects of cutting-edge technology on residents and businesses is much easier to understand.
“Today marks a significant milestone for Sarasota County and the 434,000 local residents who will benefit,’’ she said at the ribbon-cutting. “You have more resiliency, you have more capacity, you have cleaner water. And cleaner water is what we want.
“I tell everybody you want the water you do want to come on when you turn the tap in the morning and the water you don’t want to go away. And you don’t want to think about it, but you’re making the water that goes away so much cleaner for everybody and your environment.’’
This article originally appeared on sister site YourObserver.com.
