Posted on July 14, 2022
City Council approved seeking bids for the construction of the second phase of the city’s dredged material facility.
Before council’s regularly scheduled meeting, Shawn Aiken, vice president of engineering firm CT Consultants, spoke to council about the process of constructing the facility.
Aiken said the project has been through a long road. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources is still trying to regulate the facility as a dam, which CT is contesting, he said.
The version of plans discussed on Monday night are substantially the same as they were previously, with some small tweaks.
The entire site, located on Canadian National property, will receive a two foot thick clay cap, and will consist of three large sluiceways, three smaller sluiceways, and a settling basin.
The sluiceways will be filled with water and material dredged from Conneaut’s harbor.
“What’s really neat … is that then the material then grades itself, right,” Aiken said. “The heaviest stuff falls out first, and the lightest stuff falls out later, so you end up, without doing anything mechanically, having the material graded out along these sluiceways.”
As the dredged material settles out of the water, the clear water will be allowed to drain off the sluiceways.
“Once they’ve done that, opened the gates all the way down, let all the water drain out of the facility, then they just go in there with long-reach excavators, and lift the material out of the sluiceways, primarily,” Aiken said. “Some of it will end up in the settlement pond too, and put it into dump trucks.”
Embankments between the sluiceways have room for the excavators and dump trucks to drive along them.
Aiken said CT has been in contact with six contractors, and expects three to four of them to bid on the project.
Contractors will be allowed to submit a pair of completion dates for the project.
“We want it built as soon as possible, ideally, we would like it to be built so we can dredge in 2023,” Aiken said. “That’s a tall order. This is a lot of material we have to haul in here.”
Contractors can include their price and best completion date before Aug. 1, 2023, and their price and best completion date before Aug. 1, 2024.
Aug. 1 is the last day an Army Corps of Engineers dredging project can start, Aiken said.
The city has received state funding to pay for the project. The facility is necessary due to a ban on dredged material being dumped into Lake Erie.
In other business:
• City Manager Jim Hockaday said work is continuing on the Route 20 repaving project.
“They are putting in the intermediate course, and they’re going to be doing that, I think probably, at least for the next week or two, and then they’ll be doing some touch-up, and then hopefully, they’re going to immediately go into the final wearing surface,” Hockaday said.
The final layer of asphalt will stretch from the North Kingsville line to the viaduct bridge.
• Council approved the 2023 tax budget. Finance Director John Williams said the city’s estimated carryover is $2.9 million, estimated revenues of $32.6 million and estimated expenses of almost $32 million.
