Granbury East WWTP: The Satellite Plant a Capped City Had to Fight For

The Challenge

A Growing City With a Plant It Couldn’t Grow

Granbury’s existing South WWTP is legally capped — a non-expansion agreement tied to the adjacent Harbor Lakes development limits the site. So accommodating growth meant building somewhere new. The City’s Phase 1 Wastewater Improvements Program answered with two plants: rehabilitate the capped South plant in place, and build a brand-new East satellite plant for the capacity the South site can never hold.

Four Years to a Permit

Siting a new wastewater plant is rarely quiet, and Granbury East was not. The East plant drew sustained citizen opposition. The TCEQ permit went through a contested-case hearing at the State Office of Administrative Hearings (SOAH), where a two-judge panel recommended issuing the draft permit in June 2022, and all three TCEQ commissioners voted to issue the permit in October 2022 — after a process that ran roughly three to four years. The opposition also triggered a citywide development moratorium that, by local reporting, stalled on the order of $250 million in economic development and drove up the project’s cost through legal fees and pandemic-era escalation.

Why this matters for Texas plants. A new wastewater plant is a multi-year permitting and political project, not just an engineering one. Granbury’s East plant took roughly four years from process to construction award — through a SOAH contested-case hearing, a TCEQ commissioner vote, and a development moratorium. Utilities planning new satellite capacity should budget the permitting timeline as seriously as the construction timeline.

The Solution

A New 1.0 MGD Plant, Built to Reuse Grade

The East WWTP is a new 1.0 MGD plant on a 10.6-acre site at 3121 Old Granbury Road in eastern Granbury. Enprotec Hibbs & Todd (eHT) engineered a full treatment train: pretreatment with screening, grit removal, and flow equalization; secondary treatment with biological nutrient removal (BNR) and a membrane bioreactor (MBR); UV disinfection; and supporting solids storage and dewatering, SCADA, a new control building, and a new MBR support building. The plant is designed to produce TCEQ Type I reuse-grade effluent — the same reuse-grade target as the rehabilitated South plant, so the City’s two-plant system delivers a consistent effluent quality.

Equipment

Vision Equipment supplied equipment for the East plant’s treatment train. Per-section award detail is being confirmed with Vision Equipment; the equipment list below is VE’s internal project record.

The Results

Permitted, Awarded, Under Construction

One Program, Two Plants

The East WWTP is one half of the City of Granbury’s Phase 1 Wastewater Improvements Program — roughly $35 million total, pairing the new East satellite plant with the rehabilitation of the existing 2.0 MGD South plant, plus collection-system improvements, all funded under a single TWDB Clean Water State Revolving Fund loan. The City’s longer roadmap continues with a North WWTP in Phase 2 (five to ten years out) and a West WWTP in Phase 3 (ten to twenty years). Granbury East is, in effect, the City’s proof that the satellite-plant model works — and the template for the next two.

Implications for Texas Plants

Three replicable takeaways:

1. Budget the permitting fight. A contested new-plant permit can run three to four years through SOAH and TCEQ. Granbury East shows the political and permitting timeline can exceed the construction timeline — and can carry real collateral cost, like a development moratorium.
2. Satellite plants unlock capped sites. When the main plant can’t grow, a new satellite plant elsewhere in the service area is the structural answer — and it can be financed alongside the main-plant work under one SRF program.
3. Design the satellite to match the main plant’s effluent grade. Granbury’s East and South plants both target TCEQ Type I effluent, so the two-plant system behaves as one consistent utility — not two plants with two effluent standards.