Brewster Council approves bid for test well drilling

BREWSTER – J-U-B Engineers representative Steve James of Spokane updated council members on the latest developments with the city’s ambitious drinking water upgrade project during the regular meeting of the City Council last Wednesday, April 11.
“We’re almost done with the water tank,” said James. “we’re only waiting for two things; we added a mixer and the PRV vault and we expect to have that in about four weeks.”
James said the reservoir renovation will be totally done by the end of May and will come in under budget.
The second stage of the water system upgrade, manganese removal is also moving forward.
“We got a couple of well sites,” said James, and presented council members with a bid to drill two or three test wells.
James asked council members to award the drilling contract to Blue Star Enterprises in Richland, WA. Blue Star turned out to be the only bidder among four that expressed interest to show up for the bid and while James acknowledged that he would have preferred to have more than one qualified bidder, Blue Star’s bid came in at 15 percent under budget and he was comfortable with the company’s reputation to request that council proceed with the award.
City legal counsel Chuck Zimmerman interjected that the bid award to Flue Star was for test well drilling only.
“If the quantity and quality meets what the city wants then there will be another step in the process and that will be for the actual wells,” said Zimmerman. “That will go out to bid again and that will be another competitive bid and that’s a much larger project.”
James added that there is so much demand for well drillers now that even with the city’s bid deadline extended an extra week, several drillers were too committed to other projects to respond.
“Because we want to keep this project moving I think it’s in our best interests to award this,” James said, adding again that the bid was under budget.
Council member approved the bid award and James said the test wells should be finished by June.
Once we have test wells we’ll know if we have low manganese water and really what we’re looking at,” James said adding that work on production wells will probably begin sometime in October.
In other business, council members approved the Brewster Chamber’s Cherries Jubilee event application for the June 16 celebration.
Chamber president Anna Marie Dalbey also unveiled the new poster advertising the first annual event.