The City of Winder celebrated the start of new construction to their existing Highway 53 Water Treatment Plant on Feb. 22 with a groundbreaking ceremony.
Originally built in the early 1970s, it currently serves as the sole source of city water for Winder and the surrounding areas, making its functionality vital to community infrastructure.
The plant was originally built with the ability to produce 2 million gallons of clean drinking water a day, but has undergone two expansions prior to the recent groundbreaking. Those expansions brought the water output to 6.2 million gallons per day. This enabled the city of Winder to decommission its much older May Street Water Treatment Plant.
The new construction is underway as of this month and is estimated to be complete in spring 2026, which will bring the daily water output up to 9.2 million gallons. This project was designed by ESG Engineering and the construction contract was awarded to Lakeshore Engineering.
The additional 3 million gallons is vital for the City’s growing population, as the Winder-Auburn reservoir project is slated to come online in the next 5 years. Both projects aim to provide ecological resilience and reliability for the area’s 50,000 water customers.
“This project represents an investment of $19.5 million in Winder’s water system, funded by an eleven million dollar American Rescue Plan Act grant and supplemented by a Georgia Environmental Finance Authority loan,” says an official from the city’s water department, “This method of funding the water system continues to support the mission and vision of City Council, investing in the City’s enterprises without using taxpayer dollars as a subsidy.”
Improvements included in this expansion include raw water flow monitoring, water treatment method updates, optimal chemical storage and ancillary improvements to the building. Construction will be done with strategic planning in mind for future expansions to the campus.
