3rd District representative Davids visits Olathe water tower to highlight 40-year-old generator replacement

Elected officials and city staff gathered at the Olathe water tower on Renner Road Wednesday to get one last look at a 40-year-old generator that will soon be replaced.

The generator, which provides backup power for water pumps in emergencies, ensuring the city can send drinking water to a water treatment plant at all times. It is at the end of its service life, with spare parts only available through salvaging other scrapped generators. 

Olathe civil engineer Nicole Woods explained that all water in the city is stored at ground level, meaning if the generator were to fail in an emergency, the pumps sending water to the treatment plan would also fail, triggering a boil order.

The generator in question is being replaced as part of 3rd District representative Sharice Davids’ 2024 appropriations requests for $791,000. The request was submitted to her office by the Olathe city government. 

Davids said these requests are a recent development within congress due to bipartisan support and a strict vetting process. 

“Our office has generally put in requests for things like backup generators or some of that infrastructure that is vital to our community but people are not necessarily thinking of,” Davids said.

Of Davids’ 15 appropriation’s requests in her district, seven target transportation and housing, five target water treatment, two target aging hardware improvements and one focuses on police vehicles. 

One of those requests affecting Olathe water was approved Wednesday, providing two more backup generators for Water Treatment Plant No. 2 at $959,752. “​​Currently if power is lost at the collector well field, the city loses almost half of its raw water capacity from these wells, dropping from 22.9 MGD (Million gallons per day) to 11.7 MGD,” Davids’ website states. 

“We do around the city have a lot of equipment that is aging, our water treatment plant, we’ve got a whole electrical project that we just awarded a bid for, and a lot of that equipment actually dates back to the 60s,” city engineer Nate Baldwin said. “It’s not unusual for the city to have aging infrastructure like this, but we’ve really made a conscious effort to put funding into maintaining those things.”