By Carmen Ensinger
Benton and Associates engineer Greg Hillis told the Winchester Council at the Oct. 2 meeting that the city’s water main project is nearing completion. With it coming to an end comes the clean-up which means there are more workers involved.
“The pay request is a little higher this month because there have been a lot more people around town working on the cleanup,” Hillis said. “They have been doing very good work and we feel they have been meeting the requirements of the specifications.”
A pay progress meeting was held on Sept. 27 and they walked through all the specifications.
“We are getting very close to the end of the project,” Hillis said. “We have about $300,000 left to finish up.”
Hillis said closer to the end they will have a completion meeting and then do the punch list items.
“That is when we go through everything and then give them the list of items to finish up,” he said. “It might even be before next month’s meeting. We are making good progress.”
Alderman Ron Bell asked if the project was going to finish under budget.
“No, you won’t come in under budget because when we started putting in the new lines we found some problems where we couldn’t close off water mains,” Hillis said. “You run into all kinds of unforeseen problems when you are dealing with water mains this old.”
However, Hillis said he doesn’t expect the overage to go over the $240,000 in the contingency fund.
Hillis said it would have been a lot higher if the city and the construction company didn’t work so well together.
“Both the city and the construction company have had a really good relationship on this project,” Hillis said. “When you start digging, you sometime find little nuances and some of those things they have been able to work with the city on. The city had the parts they needed. So, hats off to the city crew. It has been good to see a project go so smoothly.”
The project is being funded through a $2.4 million loan the city obtained and a USDA grant. Because there are grant dollars involved, the USDA requires an on-site engineer be present during all construction.
“Our on-site engineer has been putting in a few hours of overtime and staying a little longer and his hours creeped up on us last month,” Hillis said. “The pay request for his part this month is $40,720.47 and the pay request for the contractors is $634,004.49.”
Hillis said with this pay request, the city has depleted the loan funds and will now move into using the grant funding, which is another requirement of the USDA.