The Chesterton
Stormwater Utility Board is moving ahead with the 1050N ditch project.
At their meeting
Monday night, members voted unanimously to approve a contract with DLZ, not
to exceed $20,300, to perform a topographical survey and other drafting
services as the necessary first step in piping and infilling the ditch on
the north side of 1050N between Church Street and Ind. 149 in Crocker.
The Stormwater
Utility will engineer the project in-house, Town Engineer Mark O’Dell told
the board, a prerequisite for which will be the hydro-excavation of the
underground utilities buried in the ditch--and in places, due to erosion,
actually exposed at the bottom of the ditch--in order to determine their
elevations. O’Dell was unable to say how much the hydro-excavation will
cost, but he did offer an off-the-cuff estimate of the project’s hard
construction costs: “a couple of hundred thousand.”
Some of NIPSCO’s
natural-gas lines, the exposed ones in particular, may need to be re-located
to make room for the stormwater pipes, O’Dell noted, and he’s hopeful that
NIPSCO will see its way clear to doing that on its own dime. “It’s a safety
hazard that they should be responsible for,” he said.
The Stormwater
Utility will work on engineering the project over the winter, with
groundbreaking targeted sometime in the spring.
2021 Budget
In other business,
members voted unanimously to approve the Stormwater Utility’s 2021 budget
and forward it to the Town Council. That budget projects the following:
-- Revenue for
operations: $564,000. Of that amount, $525,000 is projected to come from
“Commercial Sales,” that is, from stormwater fees.
-- Total operation
and maintenance expenses: $654,984. Of that amount, Salaries and Wages
account for $308,240; Pensions and Benefits, $128,918; Materials and
Supplies, $7,700; Contractual Services, $30,250; Transportation, $10,500;
MS4 Public Education, $1,500; Miscellaneous Expenses, $54,300; and Debt
Service, $113,576.
Nuts and bolts:
O’Dell is projecting a deficit in 2021 of $90,984. He hastened to add,
however, that this is only a projection, and that new residential
construction--at Springdale and Euston Park, for instance--as well as new
commercial construction like ALDI and the Dollar General could generate
sufficient commercial sales for the Stormwater Utility to break even or
better.
Commercial sales
can be flukey, O’Dell said. “We just don’t know. I’m always conservative on
commercial sales. That’s probably my nature.”
September in Review
In September the
Stormwater Utility ran a surplus of $15,892 and in the year-to-date is
running a surplus of $94,570. O’Dell pointed out to the board that his 2020
projection was a deficit of $25,989 but that through the first three
quarters of the year the Stormwater Utility is operating comfortably in the
black.