The City of Portland's Bureau of Water Works (Bureau) has supplied domestic water
to Portland-area residents since 1895. It is the largest supplier of domestic
water in Oregon and supplies both retail and wholesale water to nearly 840,000
people. The Bureau faces a wide variety of challenges and uncertainties as it
enters the new millennium. These uncertainties arise from three principal
sources: current federal regulatory requirements and potential future changes
that affect water quality standards, treatment, and the Endangered Species Act
(ESA); decisions by current and potential wholesale customers about whether to
obtain supply from Portland or elsewhere; and, decisions about where to obtain
additional supply in the future and whether groundwater will be a basic component
of the future supply or will be reserved only for emergencies. While the Regional
Water Supply Plan (RWSP), completed in 1996, has provided the Bureau with a
regional vision for the supply system, it did not specify how individual water
suppliers would implement that vision or how transmission and major storage would
be handled. In addition, the RWSP did not investigate what each regional supplier
would need to do in order to maintain its existing system at a high level of
reliability. With the RWSP as its reference, the Bureau undertook its own
infrastructure master planning effort to develop a long-range, integrated
approach to resolving the key issues that will materially affect the system over
the next 50 years. This paper describes the Infrastructure Master Plan (IMP)
which explores these challenges and charts alternative courses to meeting them
during the next 50 years. The IMP is also intended to be used by the Water Bureau
to guide its Capital Improvement Program (CIP) towards meeting the water system's
short-term needs over the CIP's 10-year term by both identifying new projects and
confirming the need for other previously identified projects. Includes 4 references, tables, figures.