by John Osborn
The engineering manager who has coordinated preparations for Harvard's town center sewer project for the past two years, said yesterday that the town will finally release bid documents for the $2 million project at the end of this month.
In a phone interview Thursday, Wayne Perry of Norfolk Ram, an environmental engineering firm hired by the town to supervise design and construction of the system, told the Press that the documents will be made available to interested contractors on June 29. Bids will be due at Town Hall no later than July 28 and a contract will be awarded in early August. The long awaited schedule was set Wednesday in a meeting attended by Chris Ashley, chairman of the Town Center Sewer Building Committee (TCSBC), Tim Bragan, town administrator, and Lorraine Leonard, who is the town's finance director as well as its procurement chief. Perry acknowledged that because construction is unlikely to begin until late in August, at the earliest, the work will overlap the start of the 2011-2012 school year and extend into the fall and winter. He said the contractor will be given 240 days to complete the project.
Voters approved the new system at Town Meeting in May, 2009. They passed a new by-law to create a sewer district and sewer commission to manage it, and approved the borrowing needed to build it. Once completed, an estimated 79 residences, municipal buildings, churches and businesses in the town center will be served by a low-pressure sewer, which will connect to the wastewater treatment plant on Massachusetts Avenue that already handles wastewater from Bromfield School, the town library and Hildreth Elementary School. The plant, which has been in violation of its discharge permit several times over the past decade, will receive a significant upgrade, one that will remedy past failures and guarantee it can handle the increased flow of wastewater from its new users.
When the bid documents are released later this month, the town will have reached a major milestone on a journey that has lasted two years, during which the state legislature had to approve the new by-law, the town had to win access to a low-interest state revolving fund, and the state Department of Environmental Protection had to sign-off on a design for the new system. That final approval was granted on May 26, after months of wrangling between the town and DEP engineers that led to significant modifications of the original plan.
Now one last hurdle remains. When voters at Town Meeting approved the system in 2009, they did so with a promise by the selectmen that should the cost of the project exceed $2 million—a so-called "circuit breaker" —they would call a Special Town Meeting to ask for the town's approval to exceed the original amount. Whether that circuit breaker will pop won't be known until bids have been received and a contractor chosen in early August. Perry told the Press that if the lowest qualified bid is greater than $2 million, the selectmen will call for a Special Town Meeting (STM) on August 22 to approve it. If STM approves, a town vote will be held the next day, August 23, to authorize the higher loan amount. A contract to begin construction would be awarded at the next selectmen's meeting.