Sundt starts Denton's plant carrying the overrun risk

Sundt Construction has broken ground on the Pecan Creek Water Reclamation Plant expansion in Denton, Texas, seven months after the city awarded a $92 million guaranteed maximum price contract that hands the overrun risk to the builder. The scope pairs a 75-million-gallon-per-day headworks with a 30-million-gallon-per-day membrane bioreactor treatment buildout, plus underground utility and site work inside the original plant footprint.

The new headworks is sized at more than twice the treatment buildout it accompanies, which suggests Denton is buying intake capacity ahead of the treatment trains that will use it. Building within the existing footprint adds a sequencing problem to the engineering, and Matt Bothun, Sundt's Texas regional manager for the water and wastewater group, said advanced treatment and strategic phasing would deliver the improvements while keeping the plant "fully operational and untouched" during construction of the new work.

The spending case rests on a forecast: the 2020 census counted 150,000 people in Denton, and the city's economic development partnership projects more than 200,000 by 2030, so reclamation capacity that trails the rooftops turns growth into a permit problem. The months between a February award and a fall groundbreaking are the figure worth watching in the contracts that follow.

Denton is a mid-sized entry in a state pipeline that keeps filling. Ferrovial took $721 million of water work across Austin and Fort Worth last fall; Burns & McDonnell won an $80 million reclamation job in San Marcos; and Crescent Constructors, acquired a year ago by San Antonio-based Zachry Construction, landed an $89 million treatment plant expansion in Lewisville in June. Ferrovial's bundle is close to three times those other three awards combined, which is the shape of this market: municipal jobs in the $80 million to $92 million band, awarded one city at a time, at the size where contractor capacity clears and a guaranteed maximum price remains a number a builder will sign.

Denton has capped its exposure and handed the overrun risk to Sundt, a reasonable trade for a city funding capacity from ratepayers and utility debt, and a harder one for a contractor bidding into a market where equipment and material slots have become the scarce input. Grid permission now prices before electrons. Water runs the same logic one level down: the rate case, the council vote and the capped contract are what make a plant financeable, and Denton had all three before the shovels arrived.

The next round of Texas awards — Ferrovial's Austin and Fort Worth work, Lewisville's expansion, the San Marcos plant — will show whether February-to-fall is the pattern. Consent behaves in water the way it does in the state's power queue, with community and ratepayer support folded into the same diligence binder as the interconnection agreement, and the rate case the mechanism that turns a 2030 projection into a funded plant. If February contracts keep breaking ground in the fall, the months between a city approving a plant and a contractor pouring it become the binding constraint on Texas growth. Watch the award dates.