The Los Angeles City Planning Commission has signed off on a major overhaul of the Los Angeles-Glendale Water Reclamation Plant in Atwater Village, clearing the way for new treatment tanks, a personnel building, and a water-purification demonstration facility at the site along West Colorado Boulevard. The project will also carve out roughly 18,000 square feet of public open space along the Los Angeles River, giving neighbors new riverfront access at a facility long hidden behind fencing and industrial infrastructure.
According to Urbanize LA, the approved overhaul covers the plant's footprint at 4590–4610 and 4700 West Colorado Boulevard. The project is being developed by the City of Los Angeles and will unfold in three construction phases: first the removal and replacement of existing water infrastructure, then construction of the new personnel building, and finally the water-purification demonstration facility. The outlet reports construction is projected to run over a roughly two-year period.
Lehrer Architects is designing the new building, with Studio MLA serving as landscape architect, the report notes. Those design ambitions stretch back years: Lehrer Architects describes the broader vision as creating a comprehensive facility program along an 800-foot Los Angeles River waterfront campus, with the plant envisioned as a LEED Platinum facility whose roofline is meant to echo the surrounding riverbanks. That design concept picked up a Westside Urban Forum Honor Award and a Los Angeles Business Council Design Concept Award back in 2019, according to the firm.
What's Changing at the Riverside Facility
The new open space would sit along the river's west bank, separated from the active water facility by a fence, per the same Urbanize LA account. It's a modest but notable carve-out at a site that has operated largely out of public view. The cities of Los Angeles and Glendale co-own the plant, while LA Sanitation operates and maintains it, according to the agency's own facility page from LA Sanitation & Environment, which also states the plant processes approximately 20 million gallons of wastewater per day.
The upgrade lands amid a much larger regional push to rethink how Southern California handles its water. Los Angeles currently imports about 70% of its water supply, and agencies across the region are adopting wastewater reuse strategies on a grand scale to cut that dependence, according to Engineering News-Record. The outlet points to the Pure Water Los Angeles program, which aims to boost the share of treated water recycled at the Hyperion facility from about 27% to 85% while meeting drinking-water quality standards.
A Regional Pressure Point on Imported Water
That urgency has concrete roots: in December 2021, the California Department of Water Resources announced Los Angeles would receive a zero allocation from the State Water Project the following spring, apart from minimum health and safety needs, Engineering News-Record reported. Elsewhere in the county, the scale of existing reuse infrastructure is already substantial — ten Los Angeles County Sanitation District treatment plants double as water reclamation plants, producing around 150 million gallons per day of disinfected recycled water, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
For Atwater Village residents, the more immediate payoff will be the new slice of riverfront parkland once construction wraps. The Planning Commission's approval sets the stage for that multi-year build-out to begin, with the plant's treatment tanks, personnel building, and demonstration facility arriving in sequence over the coming two years.
