City to weigh contract on portion of water line

HOT SPRINGS — A resolution awarding the contract for the first leg of the water line from the city’s new treatment plant is the first item of new business on the Hot Springs Board of Directors agenda tonight.

The engineering department recommended that the contract for the 36-inch ductile iron pipe be awarded to Kajacs Contractors of Little Rock.

According to information presented to the board, Kajacs’ $4,431,775 bid was the lowest responsive bid that the city received.

Crist Engineers, the Little Rock firm that was awarded a more than $5 million contract to design and oversee the city’s $100 million Lake Ouachita water supply project, also recommended Kajacs.

The 36-inch line will connect the plant that the city will build off Amity Road to the 12-inch main on Arkansas 7 South. The city upgraded an 1,800-foot segment of the line between Long Beach and Ashley roads from 8 inches to 12 inches before completion of the highway’s widening from the Lake Hamilton south shore bridge to Arkansas 290.

“It will run down Thunder Road to Albright Road and hit the new 12-inch line at Albright and Arkansas 7 South,” Todd Piller, the city’s major capital projects manager, told the board earlier this week. “It’s about 2.5 miles.”

The city will build a 24-inch line connecting the 36-inch line to the 20-inch line that runs along the King Expressway.

The 20-inch line is the spine of the distribution network that serves the regional water system’s 145-square-mile service area.

Piller said the city has secured a permit from the Arkansas Department of Transportation to put the 24-inch line across Arkansas 7 South before the department begins 3.79 miles of improvements from Arkansas 290 to Mitzi Parkway in Hot Spring County.

“We’ll have multiple more contracts to finish the 24-inch line that will go all the way around Mount Carmel Road and up Carpenter Dam Road and tie into the 20-inch line on the bypass,” Piller said, explaining that water from the new plant can be put into the distribution network before completion of the 24-inch line. “When we get the plant built, we may still be building the 24-inch line that goes all the way around to the bypass. But we can fire up the plant, and we can run so many million gallons a day through the plant and fill the Cornerstone tank from the new plant.

“We’ll probably be done with the plant before we get all of the rest of the 24-inch line done, but we can put the plant online and make water.”

The 3 million-gallon elevated tank behind Cornerstone Market Place went online in August. The Ouachita Water Treatment Plant that processes water from upper Lake Hamilton supplies the tank, but the 12-inch line on Arkansas 7 South/Central Avenue will fill the tank when the new plant is built. The new facility will be rated for more than 15 million gallons a day and will treat the city’s more than 20 million-gallon-a-day allocation from Lake Ouachita.

Crist has said building the plant about 20 miles to the south of its raw-water source will improve hydraulics in the distribution network and reduce water age for customers on the south and east ends of the service area. The city’s two existing plants are on the north and northwest ends of the service area.

Piller said Belt Construction, which was awarded a $4,769,153 contract in August to build the first segment of the raw waterline that will connect the new plant to the Blakely Mountain intake site, will begin work later this month. The contract was the first of five or six that the city will let for the raw waterline.

The first segment will run from the intake site to the Ouachita Plant on Cozy Acres Road, traversing Weyerhaeuser property and Garland County’s Cozy Acres Road right of way. The county agreed last year to let the city use the right of way in return for the city rebuilding the road.

According to property records, the city acquired a permanent 20-foot-wide easement last year across the 90-acre Weyerhaeuser parcel between Blakely Dam and Cozy Acres roads. In May, it acquired a permanent easement along the western boundary of a 40-acre Weyerhaeuser parcel east of Cozy Acres Road.

The city’s finance department said $76,011 has been spent from the $300,000 restricted fund that the city board established in May 2019 for easement acquisitions associated with the water supply project. More than a dozen easements for the raw and finished lines were recorded last week.

According to information presented to the board, the contract for the first segment of the finished line will be paid from the remaining balance of the $20 million bond issue the board authorized in 2018 and the $109 million bond issue that’s financing the supply project.

The water rate increase that took effect in January 2018 is securing both debt issues.

The 36-inch line will connect the plant that the city will build off Amity Road to the 12-inch main on Arkansas 7 South.

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