The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
City sewer project delayed
Missed deadline pushes project to fall
TORRINGTON — A missed deadline by the city in March caused state regulators to reject the contract for a planned sewer plant upgrade. Now, the Water Protection Control Authority will have to re-bid the project.
The delay will mean construction on the $70 million project won’t begin until late August at the earliest. Plans had called for work to begin in early summer, Mayor Elinor Carbone said earlier this week.
A new round of bidding for the project will begin Monday, said George Hicks, the supervising sanitary engineer with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. His division regulates sewer plant upgrades.
“It was clearly an oversight,” on the city’s part, he said. The missed deadline is unusual, Hicks added. “In my 25 years in the group, we have never had to reject a bid.”
The deadline for the second round of bidding is June 19. The short-time frame of a 30-day bidding window meets the state’s regulations, Hicks said, but “it’s not at all typical. If anyone asks for an extension, we will weigh in.”
“The upgrade is a state mandate,” said Carbone.
The plant hasn’t had an upgrade since the city spent $12 million on modifications in 1994. She said the new bid wording, or “specs” have modest changes in language. Carbone said she hopes the new bid document will increase interest so more contractors submit proposals. The first round of bidding had just one submission, from C.H. Nickerson, the Torringtonbased contractor.
“I’m interested to see how it works out,” said Hicks.
He said Nickerson had very competitive prices.
“Now that the price is on the street... it may generate more interest,” Hicks said.
The city started planning for the upgrade years ago, in 2005, said Ray Drew, the water authority’s administrator. That’s because the state began to enforce environmental protection regulations, he said.
The approved upgrade allows the city to receive 25 percent of the project’s total cost from the state’s Clean Water Fund. In September, the City Council voted to issue bonds for $20.3 million to supplement the $51 million borrowed in 2014.
Drew has worked for the city for 19 years and in treatment plants for more than three decades.
“Our primary goal is to submit clean water back into the (Naugatuck) river,” he said.
The two key requirements of the state’s mandate are a decrease in nitrogen and phosphorus in the plant’s treated waste water that’s released into the river.
The plant routinely meets the state’s general permit requirements for a decrease in nitrogen, Drew said. But in order to meet the state’s long-range goals, the amount of nitrogen allowed to be released from treatment plants will decrease each year. To reduce nitrogen, Drew said a chemical conversion must take place which changes nitrates to nitrites to nitrogen gas, which is then released into the air.
The water authority participates in a nitrogen reduction program which allows municipalities with low amounts of released nitrogen to sell credits to the Nitrogen Credit Exchange program. Municipalities that don’t meet the requirements can buy credits from the exchange. Drew said Torrington has received $523,000 since 2002 for selling those credits.
“Not bad for selling air,” he said.