Plains council picks builder for lagoon

At a special meeting at City Hall Thursday, Plains Town Council members unanimously selected Prospect Construction as the company to build the new sewage treatment plant just north of Plains.

Prospect Construction Inc., which has offices in Puyallup, Wash., and in Missoula, was one of three companies to bid for the job of creating the lagoon. The company won with a bid of $6,152,752. The other bidders were S&L Underground, Inc. of Bonners Ferry, Idaho, with a bid of $6,697,053, and Dick Anderson Construction of Missoula at $6,803,710. 

Plains Mayor Dan Rowan said that the bids were all more than the town had in grant money, which prompted them to apply for another grant and take out a loan to pay for the project. Shari Johnson, the town’s contract engineer, applied for a $2-million ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) grant on behalf of the town, but just in case the grant is not approved, the council voted to take out a $1.5-million State Revolving Fund loan administered by the Montanan Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. The town had already applied for a $500,000 SRF loan last month to pay for the project. Rowan said he still hopes to get the grant money, and if that is approved, the town won’t need the new 20-year loan. “It’s more like a line of credit than a loan. We are still hoping to receive the ARPA grant or Army Corps funds and not have to use any of those funds,” said Rowan.

The town received the bad news on the high bids for the project in early January just after receiving the deed for the land for the lagoon. Rowan said they were fully funded for the project when it began, but costs escalated with the elevated cost of the property from Nick and Erika Lawyer and the rise in material costs due to Covid delays, but the mayor added that moving the lagoon is a necessity because of continuous erosion at the present lagoon by the Clark Fork River. 

Several tons of large boulders were placed along the shoreline at and near the present sewage treatment plant in 2018 to hold back the river, which had come to flow against one of the lagoon dikes. Most of those boulders have since fallen into the river. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which contracted companies to place the rock, looked at the site again last year to check on the erosion and will be back again this spring to have another look, according to Rowan. The town paid the Lawyers $472,000 for the needed 10 acres for the new lagoon site and a well set-back area, located eight-tenths of a mile northwest of the town and northeast of present lagoon.

Rowan hopes construction work at the new site will start in March or April. “It looks like it’s going to move forward and be done by the end of September,” said Rowan, although there are still some details to be done in the agreement with the Lawyers. He hopes to have an answer on the new ARPA grant around mid March. 

It’s yet to be decided what to do with the present lagoon. The new lagoon calls for only three cells, versus four in the present treatment plant. The new lagoon will have newer updated materials, but another Montana community is interested in purchasing some of the old lagoon equipment, the mayor said.

Rowan said they plan to go out with bids on water projects that will be done with money received from a $2.6-million ARPA grant approved last September for water infrastructure improvement projects. With that money, the town will be replacing old galvanized pipes, put in a new well, replace the First Street water main, as well as the water main at Town Pump. Rowan said the next big project, which would cost over $2-million, would be replacing the near 60-year-old water tank.