by John Osborn
Sewer construction could begin next spring
Sometimes big news arrives when you least expect it. As Harvard baked in summer heat and residents headed for the beaches and mountains of New England, town officials learned this week that Harvard has qualified for a low-interest state loan that will let them begin work on a new town center sewer system early next year.
This is fantastic news...
—Finance Director Lorraine Leonard
The loan will allow the town to borrow $2 million at the low annual interest rate of 2 percent from a clean water state revolving fund (SRF) that is administered by the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and subsidized by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The money will pay for work to upgrade and increase the capacity of the wastewater treatment plant that currently serves Harvard’s schools and library, and to lay new sewer lines to roughly 60 municipal buildings, homes, and businesses clustered around the Common. The new system is crucial to the work of the Municipal Buildings Committee of the Board of Selectmen as it looks for ways to bring new life to the old library, Town Hall, and Hildreth House. Businesses and churches are counting on it to expand their services, and homeowners will be able to shut down aging septic systems.
Word that Harvard had been moved onto the DEP’s 2010 SRF “intended use” list came indirectly from the Norfolk Ram Group, the engineering firm hired by the Town Center Sewer Building Committee (TCSBC) to oversee its application. The Press confirmed the news by phone on Thursday with a spokesman for the DEP’s Department of Municipal Services.
“This is fantastic news,” said Finance Director Lorraine Leonard, who said in an interview with the Press this week that without SRF funds the town would have been forced to either issue bonds or postpone construction for at least a year.
Town Center Sewer Building Committee Chairman Chris Ashley told the Press by e-mail that he hoped the project could be put out to bid by January and that work could begin once the ice and snow of winter had disappeared.
“The next step,” said Ashley, “is to figure out the steps and coordination necessary to move forward. I anticipate that Lorraine Leonard, [Town Administrator] Tim Bragan, [Department of Public Works Director] Rich Nota, the Board of Selectmen, the [Town Center Sewer] Policy Committee and our engineering consultants [Norfolk Ram and Weston & Sampson] will all be involved and provide us with guidance so that by the end of August we’ll have a much better handle on [what’s involved].”
Ashley noted that before construction can start, the town has to complete its engineering plans and prepare a bid package, both of which are reviewed by the state DEP. Another consideration, he said, is determining if there are any so-called circuit-breaker conditions that would require any portion of the project to go back to a town meeting for approval. For example, he said, the most recent engineering cost estimate suggests that the project “is right near its $2 million threshold.” But since actual costs in the current economic climate may come in lower than these estimates, he added, the TCSBC had voted to recommend to the selectmen “that we plan to go out to bid in January and get bids in time to have actual cost data for this determination before spring ATM. “
The town center sewer system was approved more than a year ago at the 2009 Annual Town Meeting. Harvard applied for a $2 million SRF loan earlier this spring to cover the expected cost of its construction, but the application was at first crowded out by projects deemed more urgent by the DEP.
“Several really large projects on the initial list must have failed to get the voter approval that they needed to proceed,” noted Wayne Perry, a consultant at Norfolk Ram. As a result, an estimated $30 million in SRF funds became available on July 1 to towns whose projects were lower down on the priority list, Perry said.