The city of Warrenton is seeking to increase the capacity rating of its wastewater treatment plant to accommodate future housing development.Public Works Director Guy Gevers told aldermen Dec. 20 that his department is in the process of increasing the plant’s capacity rating from 2 million gallons of wastewater per day to 3.2 million gallons per day.A plant’s capacity rating is the maximum amount of wastewater it is capable of processing in a day. Gevers said the Warrenton plant averages 1.2 million gallons per day.With increased capacity, Gevers said the city could expand by up to 5,000 new homes.The Missouri Department of Natural Resources (DNR) regulates wastewater plants and would need to approve the new capacity rating.The city is seeking the rating increase without making any upgrades to the treatment plant itself. Instead, officials said a policy put in place last year has increased the plant’s efficiency.“We have a pretreatment ordinance that we adopted in June 2015,” Gevers said. “Any commercial company that would come in would have to meet our guidelines and control what is coming into the plant.”That improves the quality of wastewater the plant takes in, which in turn allows the plant to process the intake faster and handle more in a day.Gevers said the improved efficiency will save the city millions of dollars in upgrades. The cost of the engineering to improve wastewater quality and get the plant re-rated is a little more than $25,000, he said, while the cost of installing upgrades to make the same improvement would have been $4 million.Alderman Gary Auch said wastewater capacity is a significant limiter for housing development.“When we were getting a lot of subdivision expansion, particularly in the Truesdale area, it was a real concern as to what point would we hit capacity levels where we simply could not approve any more subdivisions,” Auch said.“That was a real stumbling block, so working on this allows the city to continue to grow.”City Attorney Christopher Graville said many of the surrounding communities have struggled with wastewater capacity. Warrenton has stood out in getting ahead of that problem, he said.“Capacity has always been the path of growth in this city,” Graville said. “We’ve never had a capacity problem because it’s always been the highest priority for city officials here. I think it puts us on the cusp of a new growth spurt.”City of Warrenton