The city of Bend, while juggling several projects to improve its sewer system, anticipates no moratorium on development even with the system at capacity, City Manager Eric King said Wednesday.

However, to keep demand for capacity in check, developers in Bend have coordinated their plans with city efforts to expand the system, he and other officials said recently. They describe a kind of dance between real estate developers who must match their building timetables with ongoing city work on the wastewater collection system.

“We can allow concurrent construction as long as the city improvements will be concluded prior to the development being completed,” said Russell Grayson, the Bend city engineer. He said the usual 12 to 24 months between a developer’s land-use application and a backhoe moving dirt usually gives the city time to coordinate its improvements with the builder’s schedule.

“You’ve always got to jump through a lot of hoops in the planning phase of development,” said Andy High, Central Oregon Builders Association vice president of government affairs. Developers, however, feel comfortable when they see the city has a plan, in this case the recently updated, six-volume, 2,000-page Collection System Master Plan, now available for public review before adoption.

Among other things, the updated plan gives the city better information on which to base its development decisions, said Tom Hickmann, Bend city director of engineering and infrastructure planning.

The 2007 version provided less detailed information, and city officials sometimes overestimated sewer capacity, he said.

High served on the city Sewer Infrastructure Advisory Group, a citizen group that provided oversight and input on the revised plan.

“It’s a plan we can move forward with,” he said. “It’s what developers want.”

In the meantime, city sewer lines are at capacity.

Expansion of the main treatment plant from 6.5 million gallons of capacity per day to 8.5 million is underway.

The city awarded a contract Oct. 1 to Taylor Northwest to resume work on the southeast interceptor, a project to extend sewer lines in that part of town.

On the north side, the city expects to start work by late spring to improve flow and increase sewer capacity, Hickmann said.

“There are actually several different projects up there,” Hickmann said.

The most important, he said, addresses “the worst capacity point in our system.”

Incoming sewage daily fills a 12-foot-deep chamber beneath the parking lot of Cascade Village Shopping Center in north Bend faster than it can empty, Hickmann said.

“It backs up literally to street level. It’s very problematic,” he said.

The plan calls for installing a larger line from that spot and tying it to a large-diameter line across U.S. Highway 97 and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad tracks to the east.

The second large project involves replumbing a network of 30 pump stations. The stations were connected in the 1990s and early 2000s by small-diameter lines to a single discharge line. That was not a good idea, he said.

— Reporter: 541-617-7815, jditzler@bendbulletin.com