Lift Station 87 costs projected at $27.1 million

McKim and Creed, the engineering firm in charge of completing the Lift Station 87 project, has found new problems with the previous engineering work since the beginning of the year. Now, they’ve put a price tag on the cost of overcoming the various problems that have affected the project over the past six years: $27.1 million.

At Monday’s City Commission meeting, representatives from McKim and Creed presented an updated projection of the cost of completing the project. Although Lift Station 87 is largely in place in Luke Wood Park, errors by the previous engineering firm now require significant reconstruction, according to city staff.

To date, $13.4 million has been spent on or obligated toward the lift station project, $8.9 million of which was spent before McKim and Creed assumed engineering duties in August 2013. The estimated remaining expenses to finish the lift station total $13.7 million, though McKim and Creed project manager Robert Garland said the group was working with a projected range of $24-27 million for the overall cost.

The project was originally budgeted at $12.5 million, with an expected completion date in December 2011. In January, the projected overall cost of the project was roughly $21 million.

Considering the rising costs, Vice Mayor Willie Shaw asked staff whether the lift station was being constructed in the proper location. Utilities Director Mitt Tidwell told the commission that it made sense to proceed with the Luke Wood Park site.

“We're on the site we have,” Tidwell said. “We've already invested in the site, and some portion is reusable. Some we'll have to modify, and some we'll have to replace. It's where we are.”

With a consent order in place to upgrade the city’s wastewater management system by April 2016 — including replacing the aging Lift Station 7, as Lift Station 87 is designed to do — commissioners were largely focused on overcoming the issues at the current site, rather than considering starting over somewhere else.

At Monday’s meeting, Commissioner Paul Caragiulo asked city staff and McKim and Creed representatives whether they’d seen a lift station constructed almost entirely below ground, as Lift Station 87 is, and they all said they had not. One of the issues discovered by McKim and Creed stems from that underground construction.

Segments of the lift station that will be regularly accessed by workers must now be raised to an elevation that will withstand a Category 2 storm surge. Currently, plans call for the ground to also be raised, keeping the structure largely concealed.

“We’re going to build a mound next to Mound Street so there’s nothing above ground but the hatches and some air intake structures,“ Tidwell said. “That’s what’s above ground now.”

Tidwell said another option for the lift station would be to store some of the underground equipment above ground for protection in case of a Category 2 storm surge, storing it behind a screening structure with the appearance of a house. City Manager Tom Barwin indicated that deciding whether to keep the underground structure or build a more visible structure was an issue for commissioners to settle.

“This is the remaining policy question, I think, that the commission is going to have to give direction on,” Barwin said.

The projected completion date of the Lift Station 87 project is January 13, 2016, with construction slated to begin this October.

Contact David Conway at [email protected].