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LEVEL CROSS — After 50 years of debate, 15 years of planning and nearly a decade of sporadic construction, Randleman Reservoir is moving through its final stages.

Dozens of workers are building purification bays, storage tanks, pipelines, pump stations and an operational center that includes a laboratory and sophisticated control room.

The $65 million project could be ready by the end of next summer to supply water to Greensboro, High Point, Jamestown, Archdale, Randleman and other parts of Randolph County.

“It’s pretty gratifying to see the whole thing coming together like this,” said John Kime, executive director of the Piedmont Triad Regional Water Authority, which is building the water plant and other facilities to serve the six partners.

The project has been through its ups and downs, including controversy about whether the Deep River that supplies it is too polluted by an urban watershed that encompasses both High Point’s closed landfill and its Eastside Wastewater Treatment Plant.

The new water plant in northern Randolph County will feature advanced technology because of such questions. A lengthy environmental review led to state and federal permits enabling the authority to build a dam across the Deep in 2001.

“The simplest way to say it is that this is a conventional plant, plus-plus,” Kime said, looking out from the second floor of the unfinished headquarters at a series of deep pools being built to precise specifications.

The system will rely on the conventional technique of using chemical additives to make impurities settle out of the water.

But then, the water will be screened again by “ultra” filtering membranes and by granular, activated carbon.

“Organics, inorganics, metals, this plant is designed to deal with it,” Kime said, referring to different types of pollutants. “It has a multiple barrier approach.”

The water plant and headquarters will cost about $42 million.

The other $23 million will build remote pump stations, large off-site storage tanks, and about 10 miles of pipeline from the plant to where the purified water flows into each community’s separate water systems.

The cost of building and operating the plant will be paid through a combination of up-front contributions and guaranteed future water purchases by the six local governments.

They formed the authority in the mid-1980s after a larger but similar project was scrapped by the Army Corps of Engineers. The project was first proposed in the 1930s.

Greensboro is the majority partner in the new lake, with a 53 percent share of both the project’s cost and the water it produces.

Initially, the plant will produce 12 million gallons of drinking water per day, of which Greensboro is entitled to about 6.35 million gallons.

The city will use its full allotment “from day one,” said Allan Williams, director of the city’s water resources department.

“I can’t think of too many of the larger municipalities in North Carolina that wouldn’t be more than happy to pay every cent we’ve paid for Randleman to have this kind of additional water supply,” Williams said.

The city is using its existing water-supply lakes north of town at close to their maximum capacity, supplemented with purchases from the Burlington and Reidsville water systems.

A contractor already has begun laying a pipeline to tie into the new Randleman network next year, Williams said.

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com