T-L Photo/ROBERT A. DEFRANK St. Clairsville Councilwoman Beth Oprisch and others hear last Monday about increases to the cost of waterline upgrades. The scope of the planned project is being reduced and will be put out to bid in about a month.

ST. CLAIRSVILLE — The economic downturn has hit the city’s long-planned upgrade of aging waterlines.

Despite considerable grant dollars from the state, the scope of the project will be reduced, since the expected price is close to doubling. During last Monday’s regular meeting of the St. Clairsville City Council, Safety and Service Director Jeremy Greenwood outlined the situation.

“The original estimate was $5 million to $7 million,” Greenwood said. “With the final numbers, it’s going to be $12.9 million, so we’re scaling back. We’re still going to do a pretty major project, but it’s not going to entail some of the outer perimeter areas where we’re going to have to go.”

The project had seemed well en route to starting. In December, the city announced it had received a $5 million grant from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, along with $250,000 from the Appalachian Regional Commission, and was seeking other loan funding.

“It’ll be a big improvement, it’s just kind of disheartening that we’re not going to get done as much as we wanted,” Greenwood said. “But everything’s gone up.”

He said the city is in the process of cutting down the project to reach an amount closer to what officials originally had anticipated.

“Material costs, asphalt costs,” Greenwood said. “In the original one we had $1.8 million of just asphalt road replacement. We had $4 million in open trenches and new pipe, $1.1 million in just reconnecting the existing service connections.”

He said these amounts have all increased.

“The $12.9 million is the new budget for what we have in there. We’ve been able to cut it out and get it down to $7.6 million is what we’re estimating. We’re cutting it back to where we thought we’d be before the price increases. … We’ll spend the money, but it’s not going to go as far as we want it to.

“Some of the ones where we’re replacing lines, we were going to be replacing the fire hydrants, too. Now wherever we’re replacing lines we’re still going to replace fire hydrants, we’re just not going to replace as many,” he said.

Greenwood added there are currently 12 non-operational hydrants in the city out of 208.

More details will be released when the new designs are complete.

“I don’t have revised drawings yet,” he said, adding that a new engineering plan is expected within the month. “We’ll get it revised and go from there.”

Greenwood added he originally had expected to place the project out to bid at this time, but reassessing matters will delay bidding for about a month.

“Out to bid in a month roughly, and then bids are due in November,” Greenwood said.

Planning the water upgrades has been a lengthy process and has made several other operations subject to change. The grant announcement accelerated plans to upgrade the aging water distribution system, but also meant postponing the scheduled paving of many city streets, since the newly paved streets would have to be torn up again for waterline upgrades.

In accordance with Ohio Environmental Protection Agency mandates, the city plans to purchase water from Belmont County rather than utilize its own antiquated water treatment plant and surface reservoirs.

The city is also facing an additional complication since the main line from the plant was found to be leaking in August 2021. The city has since run a temporary waterline across Interstate 70 from the treatment plant to the rest of the city using the overpass that carries Reservoir Road. Installing a new line under the I-70 crossing was scheduled to begin during the summer, but that work was pushed back to October or November after the Ohio Department of Transportation completes a paving project. Council President Jim Velas noted this also means an added expense of $8,000 per month for a stop light installed on Reservoir Road.