Sewage Plant to Become New Park

A Southside facility that handles about 2 million gallons of raw sewage could one day be the site of youth baseball games and wooded walking trails.
 
Tony Thomas has been pushing for more recreation facilities on the Southside for years.
The city used to operate a lighted athletic field and community park on land owned by Armstrong Atlantic State University. Four years ago, that deal ended and since then Alderman Thomas has pushed relentlessly for some sort of replacement.
 
“Since the Southside was annexed more than 20 years ago,” Thomas explains, “the city has been busy fixing infrastructure problems like roads and drainage. Now we are to the point that we can bring our neighbors out here the same level of recreation that older parts of the city enjoy.”
 
He points to the recent conversion of the Windsor Forest Sewage plant into Joseph Tribble Park, a 55-acre lake and walking trails as a visible part of the city’s commitment to Southside neighborhood improvement. Now city staff are pursuing another sewer to park conversion, this time at the Wilshire Plant off Largo Drive.
 
Currently the Wilshire Plant is handling millions of gallons of raw sewage. Waste  is pumped in from various nearby neighborhoods, consumed in a bacterial soup then mixed with chlorine to the point that it is almost drinkable. The cleaned effluent then travels nearly 10 miles through pipes and pumps before it dumping into the Savannah River near the Talmadge Bridge.
 
The city wants to close the plant, send the raw sewage through the miles of pipe to downtown Savannah. They would then have to construct a cross-town pipe to carry the waste  to the President Street treatment plant.
 
All of this is expected to take a tremendous feat of engineering, one that doesn’t come cheap. It is estimated that just closing the plant and diverting the flow could cost $14 million. Council took the first step down that path today with the approval of a $635 thousand engineering contract. The total cost of the project could rise depending on what the engineers decide must be done to make it work.
 
If they can figure out how to divert the flow, the 64-acre Wilshire site could then be transformed for between $7 and $9 million. While Tribble is a passive park, designed mainly for walking and fishing, the new park envisioned for Wilshire will be a full-fledged recreation facility with multi-sport fields and a playground.
 
While the total price could top $23 million, city staff says the project will take five years and each step will be carefully assessed before any money is spent. “Our recreational facilities are an important thing to our community,” explains Assistant City Manager Chris Morrill, “and,” he adds, “this isn't money we're going to be spending tomorrow this is long range planning.”