City earmarks $658K for water facility

Council OKs job orders, purchases during Wednesday meeting

Yuma has earmarked more than half a million dollars for improvements to the Figueroa Avenue Water Pollution Control Facility.

During Wednesday’s regular meeting, the City Council approved a $657,551.57 job order with PCL Construction for capital improvements to the facility.

Each year, the city’s Utilities Department performs overhauls of its wastewater treatment facilities to ensure that both are performing properly, according to a staff report.

The city has prioritized repairs to the FWPCF’s primary clarifier, which separates liquids from solids, for this year’s annual overhaul. The project is critical for maintaining adequate service at the facility, the report notes.

The council awarded the treatment facilities contract to PCL in 2017, but the city issues a separate job order for each project, and any job order exceeding $100,000 is presented to the council for approval.

For this job order, PCL will design and construct all improvements and repairs, which are expected to extend the life of the clarifier for at least an 10 years.

The job order also requires the contractor to complete the project within 70 days. Funding in the amount of $500,000 is available in the Fiscal Year 2019 Capital Improvement Program budget. The remaining $157,551.57 will be taken from Capital Improvement Plan sewer accounts with no impact to other projects.

The job order was part of several items approved as part of the consent agenda. Another job order going to PCL Construction calls for repairs to Lift Station No. 8, located at 32nd Street and Avenue B, in the former Kmart parking lot, at a cost of $209,307.91.

During the Tuesday work session, Councilman Mike Shelton said he want-

ed to make sure the city wasn’t “leapfrogging” over other lift stations in neighborhoods whose flooding would cause more issues than flooding in the vacant Kmart site which has no homes and minimal businesses.

Jay Simonton, director of the Utilities Department, clarified that this job order involves a sewer lift station, not a stormwater lift station which are designed to help prevent flooding.

Shelton asked what would make this lift station fail. Simonton said that the facility works under “pretty harsh conditions” that cause its components to wear out. Because there is not a lot of flow going through this station, the water stays in there longer, leading to corrosion.

The project is critical for maintaining adequate service in the wastewater collection system, the report notes. These repairs are also expected to extend the life of the lift station for at least 10 years.

Other expenses approved by the council include:

• The purchase of a 2019 Peterbilt Model 520 truck and McNellus 25 yard rear loader for $280,900 from Rush Truck Centers of Yuma. The rear loader is replacing two 2000-year model 5-yard debris trucks that will be declared surplus. Funds will be taken from the 2019 Equipment Replacement Fund.

• The $190,396 purchase of traffic signal poles and components from Econolite Control Products of Anaheim, Calif. A staff report notes that the aged conditions of traffic signal infrastructure calls for replacements. The city is currently working to standardize intersection signals using Econolite products.

• An expenditure of $100,000 using a cooperative purchase agreement initiated by the City of Casa Grande for manhole rehabilitation from Southwest Environmental Testing of Phoenix. A report states that the city has more than 2,500 sanitary sewer manholes and that corrosive hydrogen sulfide gas over time begins breaks down and compromises the integrity of the manhole walls. To prevent disruption to service due to manhole failures, the manhole structure periodically must be rehabilitated and/or replaced.

The Utilities Department recently completed the successful use of a “cost-effective no-dig” technology to clean, repair and line 11 existing manholes along 32nd Street. In certain situations, the report notes, this technology extends the life of existing manholes and reduces the cost of a full manhole replacement, while minimizing the disruption to the public.