Board of Public Works - Regular Meeting

All right. Welcome, everyone, to the Utilities Committee meeting for August 12. Calling the meeting to order, we will start by rising for the Pledge of Allegiance. Please join me. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible,

and

with liberty and justice for all. And I have a blessed bread.

All right. Thank you. Please be seated.

All

right. Roll call of membership. Let it be noted that Alder Heffernan is excused, we'll introduce ourselves starting on my left.

Adrian Stansel Martin, District 11.

Fred Meltzer, District 2.

Josh Lambrick, District 1. Denny Dougherty, District 15.

All right. Thank you. And now for approving the minutes from the previous meeting, twenty five-nine thirty six, to approve the July 8 Utilities Committee meeting minutes.

Motion to approve. Second.

All right. We have a motion and a second. All in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any abstentions or nay votes? There are none. So the minutes are approved. We do not have any public hearings or appearances today and we have one action item, 20Five-nine37 to award R25 Root Control contract to Duke's Root Control Inc. In an amount not to exceed $35,000

A motion to approve or motion?

Need a motion so you can make a motion approve or

Motion to approve. Second.

And we have a second. All right. And did staff want to give us an introduction on that? Deputy Director Newburger. Go ahead.

Thank you, Chair. So I think the highlight here is if you took a look at the bid tabs, you'll probably notice two things stick out to you. One is that we only got one bid, and the other is that the requested award is less than the amount of the bid. So the way that the bid was set up, it allows us to do as much or as little in terms of the bid quantities as we can afford to do. So the award recommendation kind of acknowledges that the original budget was $25,000 And it makes use of $10,000 in the storm water maintenance funds for a spot repair project that has not been bid out yet.

And we didn't go all the way up to the $41,000 in the bid because we didn't want to give up too much in the spot repair program. So we increased it enough to take advantage of properly sized projects in a way that the contractor can support in terms of modifying the bid quantities while still allowing us to get done what we really want to get done on the spot repair program. So that's why you see those differences between the award amount and the bid tab.

Thank you very much. You preempted a question that I have. I do have another question though. So we have the budget 25,000 and the estimate 28,000. What's the relationship between those two numbers?

So I would say the reason that the estimate is higher than what was budgeted is we were maybe hoping that we would get better bid prices that would maybe suggest that the actual bids would come in less than what our engineer estimated they would come in. And in this case, it actually worked in the opposite direction. The unit prices came in a little bit higher. So to some extent, we're a little bit at the mercy of the market conditions in terms of the contractor availability. One thing that we are already doing, I think, to try to improve the bid prices that we get are this program only gets run every other year.

So that allows us to put together a larger bid package than we would do every year. So it makes it it creates some efficiency for the contractor in terms of making their mobilization cost less impactful in terms of only having to mobilize once every two years versus every single year with a smaller package. So at this point, we feel like we're kind of pulling the right levers to try to get some efficiency out of this. I think we'll continue to evaluate this program. In the future, we'll have to consider things like do we want to go with it every three year program to, again, try to get even more efficiency out of mobilization elements.

But you know that that has diminishing returns too. We want to stay on top of things and not let things get too spread out.

Thank you very much. And just for context and for the public that might be watching, what exactly is the chemical root foaming of sanitary sewers?

Right. So I can't think of the name of the chemical right now, but basically it kills off roots that have penetrated into the sewers. Typically that'll happen in a joint. So these roots have a way of finding moisture. So they head for the moisture in our pipes. And it'll kill off that root, make it brittle so that it can easily be mechanically removed, and it also retards future growth in that same root system and deters it from growing in that along those branches that are headed toward the sewers.

All right. Thank you very much. Any comments or questions from the committee?

I have a question. So with regards to the total amount of the being $41,000 we have up to $35,000 it sounds like is what we're approving right now. How will they prioritize which question. Slide.

A comprehensive listing of every sewer segment other than each location is evaluated on a case by case basis. And we would try to do it in a way where, again, in the spirit of trying to make mobilization as efficient as possible, if we've got a certain segment of pipe that needs attention, we would try to get that whole segment done as opposed to say, I will do half of it and then we'll get the neighboring half done next year. We'll try to keep the chunks relatively large. Thank you.

Go ahead. So just in a meeting this morning, the project engineer also, to add to Pete's point, did clarify and state that the prioritization also occurred on a priority of need. So the ones that have the greater need are going to take precedence over those, that do not have as much. So it's proximity and

the need

Thank you, for the Director.

All right. Are we all ready to vote then? All right. All in favor say aye. Any opposed or abstaining? If there are none, that is recommended for approval. Moving down, we have our information items. The water main break sorry, 20Five-nine3038, eight water main break reports for May and June, and the water distribution and meter team monthly report for May and for June.

So May and June themselves compared to last year, pretty similar. We're still a little bit above where we were this time last year. But I think the twenty year average for any given year is about 90 water main breaks in a year. So we're still on par with that. So nothing else really stands out to me but I'd be happy to answer questions.

All right. Thank you. Do we have any questions?

I have a question. And so I was looking at it looks like the cast iron pipes, there were two that had a significant amount of time that there were not found. Can you just help me understand that? This is my first time kind of reviewing some of this and seeing the significant amount of time and just help me understand kind of how that gets observed like found and why that might have been that amount of time?

Yeah, good question. So the easy ones are the water main breaks that surface and the water spilling out into the roadway or into the terrace area. Somebody reports that to us or we see it and we have a pretty good idea something's going on in that general vicinity. Many other times, that's not the case. So the water might be a small crack in the pipe, and that water is gonna take the path of least resistance.

So gonna follow a gravel stone bed of a sewer main or something. A lot of times this water ends up following our storm sewer system, getting into an inlet, and going back out to the river. Sometimes we'll find them that way. We might hear, you know, we don't have any rain for a couple of weeks up until this past week. Should be dry conditions.

Shouldn't be hearing any water coming into an inlet. We hear water coming into an inlet or catch basin, we'll start poking around to see what's going on. Other times we will be listening on fire hydrants and if you hear a noise when you shouldn't be with the valve closed or something then that indicates that there's water coming out of that pipe. We'll start we'll take a closer look at those. Sometimes it could be maybe a resident says, boy, my sump pump's been running a whole bunch and it's been very dry out.

Something that's strange likely could be a water main break in the area or a service leak for their water system or something along those lines. So we find them in various different ways. Then for reporting out, we need to keep track of how much water was lost. And we can't go back any further than the first of the year. So if we find one that seems like, boy, with the soil that was eroded around the pipe and the corrosion and things, we think this has been happening for three years, we can only go back to the first of the year because we have to report out our water loss on an annual basis.

Now we'll use our judgment in between that. Do we think it's been a couple of days these ones that surface? Usually it's a big break, water start popping up, you might see duration of four hours. Other times, it's we found it one of these other ways that I mentioned, the water was eluding us for a while, and we're just gonna use our best judgment based on the size of the crack we found, the soil conditions, how much soil was washed away around that pipe when we found it, those type of things to give it a a date that we think it started. And, again, that's used for reporting how much water was lost at the end of the year. Thank you.

Thank you. Any other comments or questions? All right. Then we need motion on item number eight.

Motion to adjourn. Second.

A motion and a second. All in favor of adjourning say aye. Aye. Any opposed or abstaining? We are adjourned. Thank you all very much.