Contract awarded for final phase of Lewis & Clark Regional Water System’s water treatment plant

TEA, S.D. (KCAU) — The final phase for a multi-state water system’s water treatment plant near Vermillion will soon be started.

Lewis & Clark Regional Water System (L&CRWS) said in a release that the group’s board of directors has awarded PKG of Fargo a $103,669,000 contract to work on the third and final phase of the plant. More than $85 million of the bid was to complete the Base System. Another $18 million is for a second clearwell that will be an expansion to the water reserve.

The water treatment plant will provide 20 cities and rural water systems in Iowa, South Dakota, and Minnesota with 44.19 million gallons of water a day. The second clearwell would increase the reserved capacity to 60 million gallons a day.

L&CRWS Executive Director Troy Larson said that this was the largest contract the group ever awarded not accounting for the time value of money. The 2009 contract for Phase 2 of the water treatment plant had amounted to only about two-thirds of this recent contract at $66.6 million.

Engineers had estimated the cost to be a total of $86,934,000, but Larson said they only received one bid.

“Only one bid was received and it was much higher than expected.  Disappointing but not surprising given the current bidding environment where contractors have their hands full due to the influx of infrastructure bill and ARPA funding,” Larson said. “It was hard for us to imagine being in a better spot if we rejected the bid and re-bid the project, but an excellent chance we would end up in a worse position given the other large scale projects being bid very soon in the region.”

Construction on the third phase is expected to begin this spring with a substantial completion deadline set for October 2027. An interim deadline for the clearwell is set for the end of 2026, as there is South Dakota ARPA funding needs to be spent by then.

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