(Spirit Lake)– The Spirit Lake City Council Tuesday awarded bids on a couple of major projects. The first is for the reconstruction of 23rd Street from Hill Avenue east. As we reported previously, that project is scheduled for this summer. The council awarded the bid following a public hearing during Tuesday’s meeting. City Attorney-Administrator Gregg Owens says the low bid from Beck Excavating of Spirit Lake came in below the engineer’s estimate…
“We’re at about 85 percent of the engineer’s estimate. It’s just a little over $1.75 million so we’re excited about the numbers. The project should proceed as soon as the weather allows. Expect a busy summer on 23rd Street. They’ll try to keep the work to the east until school gets out, but I would caution people to prepare to use all of the parking that’s available for the school park, there, to the south if they’re going to access the Little League games and diamonds this summer because at some point the entire street’s going to be torn up and will be inaccessible.”
The other bid was for the second phase of upgrades at the city’s water treatment plant. It was awarded to Woodruff Construction. This was the second time a bid letting was held on that project. Only one bid was received the first time and it came in higher than the engineer’s estimate. Owens says they had better luck this time around…
“The bid came in this time at approximately $4,400,000. It was almost $5 million the last time and although that savings might not sound like a lot, $600,000 is a lot. And since last year, we also found some other things that needed to be added to the project in the water plant. Taking all of that into consideration, we’re probably at a real savings based on an apples to apples from the prior bid of closer to three quarters of a million dollars so in terms of the taxpayer interest it paid off to send this back out and do it again.”
Owens goes on to explain how the project is being funded…
“We did bond for the original project for this phase two last summer and so we have $3.5 million presently set aside for that from that bond sale, and I would suspect given the amount this came in, we’ll bond for that further in approximately could be 10 to 12 months. We’ll wait and see when we need the money. Whether that will affect water rates honestly remains to be seen. There may be a slight uptick. We haven’t adjusted them for many years but there’s no present plan to do that and the projections I saw the last time we ran some were that if we have an increase in water rates at some point in the next two or three years it’s really not going to be very significant especially compared to what you see going on every where else.”
Owens adds the upgrades will allow the plant to increase its capacity without having to construct a new facility at a cost of tens of million of dollars.
