February 12, 2019
Once the costs were revised, Terrytown is about ready to start work on the next phase of its project to completely update the city’s water system.
The city has already completed its connection with Gering, which is providing water for Terrytown.
The next two phases are to upgrade the city’s water mains and to connect all residential and commercial buildings to a water metering system. But when requests for bids were returned, the work came in at about $700,000 over budget.
The city engineer met with bidders Paul Reed Construction and Hennings Construction to see what cost savings could be made.
One cut would eliminate the final phase to refurbish the city’s water tower. Instead, the tower will be decommissioned entirely. With Terrytown’s water now coming from Gering, they have 2 million gallons for storage, which is more than adequate for them.
Terrytown was able to negotiate about $58,000 in savings from Paul Reed and about $34,000 from Hennings.
Once cost cuts were made, a new budget was forwarded to the state and to the USDA, just about the time the government shut down for 35 days.
“We’re good to go now,” said Mike Olsen, speaking for the city engineer. “The USDA is working on getting the application submitted and we’ll be having preliminary conferences with both contractors next week.”
The new contract price for all the work is just over a million dollars.
