Anchorage Assembly to vote Tuesday on $6.7 million wastewater bleach contract with lone bidder

Anchorage's wastewater plant would keep buying disinfectant bleach at $9.96 a gallon from the same supplier under a contract the Anchorage Assembly is scheduled to act on Tuesday. Only one company bid.

The Anchorage Water and Wastewater Utility is asking the Assembly to approve a contract with The Blomfield Company that sets a unit price and lets the utility order as it needs to. The annual ceiling is $2,241,000, enough for about 225,000 gallons. The term is one year with two one-year renewal options, which would bring the total to $6,723,000 if both are exercised.

Bids were opened July 30. The Purchasing Office received one, from Blomfield, the current vendor. The utility's invitation to bid had gone out 16 days earlier. The administration recommends approval.

The bleach is delivered to the John M. Asplund Wastewater Treatment Facility and used to disinfect treated wastewater before it discharges into Cook Inlet, as the plant's federal permits require.

Asplund holds a Clean Water Act waiver from secondary treatment. It discharges 25 million to 35 million gallons a day that have been through primary treatment only, disinfected by chlorination. If the waiver ended, the utility told the Assembly in 2021, meeting secondary standards would cost $800 million to $1.2 billion.

The Assembly approved a Blomfield contract for the same chemical in August 2023 at $7.96 a gallon, which makes the new price about 25 percent higher. The Asplund plant is the largest wastewater facility in Alaska and has run since 1972. Its permit has been administratively extended by the EPA since the utility applied to renew it in 2005, 21 years ago.

The National Tribal Water Council, which advises the EPA, wrote in a December 2024 white paper on the waiver that the utility should address the "broad environmental and species impacts" of discharging sodium hypochlorite continuously into Cook Inlet. The utility told the Assembly in 2021 that its monitoring had found no adverse environmental impacts and none on beluga whales.