ACWA Honors East Bay Municipal Utility District With 2011 Clair A. Hill Award

SACRAMENTO, CA--(Marketwire - May 12, 2011) - The Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA) today presented the prestigious Clair A. Hill Award to East Bay Municipal Utility District for its innovative Richmond Advanced Recycled Expansion (RARE) water project.

The award was presented during the annual ACWA Spring Conference & Exhibition, where more than 1,700 local water officials are gathered through Friday for programs and panel discussions on a variety of key water issues. East Bay Municipal Utility District was selected from among six finalists to receive the award.

"East Bay Municipal Utility District is an outstanding example of a local agency implementing creative solutions to manage California's water resources," ACWA President Paul Kelley said. "East Bay MUD's program demonstrates innovation and achieves real water savings by recycling effluent from a nearby wastewater district. It managed to do all this without any cost to its ratepayers."

Helping to meets its goal of delivering 20 million gallons per day of recycled water by the year 2040, the district completed a water treatment plant that treats secondary effluent from a local wastewater district for use by the Richmond Chevron oil refinery.

Using microfiltration and reverse osmosis, the project delivers 3.5 million gallons per day of highly purified water to the refinery, reducing demand for potable water by the same amount. Financed entirely by Chevron, the project had no effect on the water district's rates. By redirecting flows from the wastewater district, the project will reduce wastewater and pollutant discharges into the San Francisco Bay for part of each year.

ACWA's Clair A. Hill Water Agency Award for Excellence is an annual award program that recognizes outstanding achievements by public water agencies. The winning agency has the honor of awarding a $5,000 scholarship to a deserving student in the name of Clair A. Hill, founder of the consulting engineering firm CH2M Hill.

Other finalists for this year's award were:

• Contra Costa Water District, for its Middle River Intake Project, which has improved water quality and reliability and increased operational flexibility for the district.
• Kern County Water Agency, for its Treated Water Capacity Expansion Project, which nearly doubled the treated water delivery capacity of the Henry C. Garnett Water Purification Plant to 72 million gallons per day.
• Oakdale Irrigation District, for its Water Resources Plan, a long-term planning document for modernizing and rebuilding the district's water delivery system.
• Riverside Public Utilities, for its Precision Nozzle Replacement Pilot Program, which resulted in a lifetime water savings of 302 million gallons.
• Vista Irrigation District, for its Vista Flume Rehabilitation Project, which replaced an 80-year-old gravity flume with high density polyethylene pipe, causing minimal impact to the environment.

ACWA is a statewide association of public agencies whose 440 members are responsible for about 90% of the water delivered in California. For more information, visit www.acwa.com.