Public Property Update

September 8, 2009

The City of Oregon looked at a rotary sludge press demonstration in Knoxville Illinois, and the Huber unit is made in Germany and has been used successfully in Europe for years.  This will be a consideration for the City of Oregon wastewater upgrade and if it can be sandwiched in, it will solve our problems with the 20% of sludge that will remain after the bio-solids system.

Ehmen Industries has separated the Oregon Post Office storm water from the City sanitary sewer.  Removing the parking lot and roof storm-water from our system is going to help the City considerably with eliminating overflow discharges into the Rock River. The parking lot drain and roof drains were connected to our sanitary and they are now connected to the storm sewer.

The Etnyre sanitary forced wastewater main connection to our sewer system is nearly complete, and MDES will be inspecting the system early next month before being put into operation. 

MDES employees have cleaned 24,000 feet of sewer mains so far this summer.  The cutting of roots and jetting will continue for the remainder of the summer season.  In the future, MDES thinks that one half of the City sewer-line’s can be cleaned each year.

MDES has installed 146 radio read water meters this summer and they expect to have the remaining in stock 69 meters, installed by years end.  If possible, the department will purchase an additional 200 meters for stock at the special price quoted for the year 2009.  The City now has 500 radio meters installed and has 900 more required. 

Progress with the GSI mapping is nearly complete and we can expect the completed program installed on our computer in early October.  This will make water main and valve information available in one computer program. 

The bid opening for the Wastewater Treatment Plant Upgrade was held on August 14th at 4pm.  There were seven bidders with the two lowest bids submitted by experienced construction companies from Rockford and Gurnee, Illinois.   The Engineer’s Opinion of Probable Construction Cost was $4,459,000 and Sjostrom & Sons of Rockford submitted the low bid of $3,451,340.  The highest bid submitted was $4,946,914.  We hope that the bid will be accepted by the IEPA within six weeks and then construction can begin.  CMT will have an engineer at the project site full time to observe construction activities.

Initial project costs were estimated at $4,000,000 in 2007 and the project costs increased $1,600,000 to $5,600,000 (loan authorization amount) because of the delay in funding approval by the IEPA, addition of the influent pump station replacement, and 3% contingency allowance.  Actual project cost of the upgrade is $4,400,340.  The City will be receiving a $477,000 STAG Grant and $980,835 ARRA stimulus forgiveness.  The City will receive a no interest loan of $2,942,505 with an annual payment of $147,125.

There will be up to a 90-day delay waiting for our selection of a contractor to be approved by the IEPA.  The project is expected to be completed and in operation by December of 2010.  The documentation necessary to meet all requirements for this project is unbelievable, and the City credits CMT with walking the City through this maze of regulations.