Crown Point awards more sewer separation contracts
By Carrie Napoleon Post-Tribune correspondent October 31, 2012 12:52PM
Updated: December 2, 2012 2:07PM
CROWN POINT — Officials awarded about $1 million in contracts Wednesday in the latest round of storm water separation work mandated by the state. The Board of Works and Public Safety awarded two contracts, one for manhole rehabilitation and the other for sewer rehabilitation and improvements, as part of an Indiana Department of Environmental Management consent decree issued in 2007 requiring the city to separate storm water from its sanitary sewer system. “This will keep us in compliance with the court order established in 2007,” Mayor David Uran said. Culy Contracting Inc., of Winchester, Ind., submitted the low bid of $385,035 for the manhole project with all its alternates. Visu-Sewer Inc., of Milwaukee, submitted the low bid of $605,798 for the sewer work and alternates, according to Tris Miles, director of engineering. In order to comply with the mandate the city has until 2018 to separate its storm water from the sanitary sewer lines. Overall cost of the separation was expected to be about $36 million. The mandate is unfunded. The city and project engineer Commonwealth Engineering have been working since then to identify problems and make improvements to the city’s sewer system to decrease infiltration. Smoke testing of the entire system in 2011 identified the problems that will be corrected in this next phase of work. “This actually puts us a little ahead of the curve,” Miles said. As the city completes projects, IDEM has revised its 10-year compliance plan to take into account the work that has been completed. “We had our annual progress survey just yesterday,” Miles said following the meeting. “It went very well.” Once this phase of work is complete, the next phase involves monitoring the performance of the system through a network of automatic flower meters to see where the next problem areas may be. “This enables us to track it more carefully,” Miles said.
