The Crawford City Council has awarded a nearly $1.2-million dollar contract to Paul Reed Construction of Scottsbluff for upgrades to the city water system along with two stretches of sanitary sewer associated with the project.
The project was bid for 3 phases and only 2 companies submitted qualifying bids that could not have been much closer.
Paul Reed’s $1,770,484.31 bid was $653.17 under Myers Construction of Broken Bow at the opening, but a discrepancy in the Myers bid on water meters between the written and figure forms dropped it $546.83 below Reed.
Both bids were well above the roughly $1-¼-million in available construction funds, so project engineer Tim Eisenhauer of Baker and Associates recommended dropping the meters, cutting nearly $580,000 from Reed’s bid and $313,000 from Myers’
Reed said it couldn’t start work until Sept while the city wanted the sewer portion done as soon as possible because of increasing maintenance concerns with the existing mains.
In a compromise, Reed agreed to send a crew to start the sewer lines around mid-May with the city paying an additional $6,300 in mobilization costs.
That left Paul Reed’s final bid at $1-million-189-thousand dollars, about $59,000 under the available funding. Work on the water pipeline will start in September.