Cloverdale receives many bids

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

CLOVERDALE -- At the last regularly scheduled meeting of the year, the Cloverdale Town Council opened a number of sealed bids for three projects, the most important of which was for the painting of the inside of the town standpipe.

The standpipe, or water tower, provides a back up water supply and helps to provide water pressure to the town. The type of paint required for the inside of a water pipe contributes to the cost.

The need for the painting of the inside of the pipe has been known since 2001, and is reaching a critical point.

"The current assessment of it is that if you don't do something now, you may not have a water system," said town attorney Allan Yackey.

The standpipe holds 900,000 gallons. When the standpipe is offline, the water treatment plant has to be run all the time.

The council said the painting is necessary for the town.

"You don't have a town if you don't have a water system," board vice president Dennis Padgett said.

MK Painting Inc. in Michigan had the lowest bid at $152,000. Board president Cathy Tipton said between the bid and other incidental costs, the project would cost between $175,000 to $200,000.

"You have the option of rejecting the bids and starting over again," Yackey said. "The problem is, if you do that, the next set is typically higher."

The council had decided to secure the bids and then wait until the beginning of the year to secure funding.

If the town cannot produce funding for the project, it can use a type of bond that can be funded by a property tax increase to fund the project.

"You only want to use that if it's one of those things where you have to," Yackey said.

Yackey said there is a process to getting such a bond that can take a while. He said if there was a chance such a bond was going to be used, he wanted to begin looking for bond counsel for the project.

"If your water system goes down, that's a catastrophe," he said.

The town also received bids to create a combined roof and shelter between two barns that already exist. The new structure would provide the jetter truck with a heated environment during winter months. The jetter truck is used to clean sewer lines.

The lowest bid, from RL Quality Custom Framing, would cost $17,387.63 to build the new structure. The council noted that the price was substantially less than the other bids, with the highest bid costing almost $10,000 more.

"We want to check with him and make sure he understands what he's doing," Yackey said.

The council will make a decision on the pole barn at the next utility board meeting, on Dec. 27.

The council also received bids on the cost to board up the old Cloverdale Inn. The inn is being used as a place to sleep by vagrants, who light fires in the toilets.

More items from the Cloverdale Town Council meeting will be in tomorrow's issue.

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  • "We want to check with him and make sure he understands what he's doing" - why did you even let him place a bid if you did not know if he understood the project?

    -- Posted by Areede on Wed, Dec 15, 2010, at 3:05 PM
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