Chesterton Tribune

 

 

Stormwater Board moves ahead on 1050N ditch piping

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By KEVIN NEVERS

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.

 

 

Posted 10/20/2020

 
 
 
 

 

 

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