UPDATE ON FAILED BALLSTON LAKE
SEWER DISTRICT typed from live recording of Ballston Town Board meeting Feb. 25,
2019:
Kim Kotkoskie’s discussion on Ballston Lake Sewer
District:
Kim: “I wanted to start before I get into the bids by giving some of the project
background. I think it’s important to understand when you look at the bid
numbers. The lake itself has been studied for over 20 years, I’ll start with
the background in 2012 when DEC placed it on the NY State 303 D Impaired Water
Body list. It is listed as impaired for phosphorus and one of the contributing
sources was septic. Failed septic systems. In 2015 the town of Ballston created
the Ballston Lake Sewer District based on a Map Plan and Report that was
written by Delaware Engineering. It was also reviewed by the town engineer, CT
Male. In that report there’s a cost estimate overall for the whole project of
$10.2 million. This is based on preliminary engineering alone, it went out to a
public vote which passed. In 2016 the town received a grant of $2.5 million
from NYS Environmental Facility Corp. which is a clean water state revolving
fund. In 2017 we initiated a design phase is what you call it in the
engineering world, a new contract was awarded to Adirondack Mountain Engineering,
legal work was initiated, I was brought on board along with several other
subcontractors. A lot of field work was done, the public saw surveys being
done, _on _ in roadways, wetland mapping, permitting, plans were initiated
which were quite extensive, the local law which everyone is familiar with was
drafted. We also have an operations and maintenance agreement that was signed
between the county sewer district, the town of Ballston, and the town of
Clifton Park. And we started our public awareness and information sessions. In
2018 we went into more of the details of the design phase. There are over 200
easements on the project, most of which were acquired, the final plans were
done and a closer look at costs was done. At that time, we realized that costs
had increased, and we also realized that that grant was after the date the
district was created, so we did an overall project cost increase to $12.7
million. Agencies approved the plans, the bid documents were prepared and
released in December. And then on January 30th of this year, we entered into
what we would call the construction phase and we received our bids and did a
bid opening. That whole time period there cost $760,000. So now we look at the
bids that we opened on Jan. 30th. This project was put out with a base bid and
seven alternates. An alternate is what we would consider an option. It was also
put out knowing we would sign two contracts. One is construction the way we
think of it---we’re going to go out there and put the sewer in the ground. And
the second one is electrical work only, and this is done due to a law in NY
State outside of the city and then the counties, if you have a project with
construction over $500,000 you need to bid electrical work separately, it’s
called Ricks Law (??). So, you have to add our two lowest bids that we received,
umm, these are all different companies A thru F. And we come up with the $12.47
million-dollar project for construction only. Unfortunately, within a couple
days, bidder A notified the town that they had a multiplication error in their
rock line item, this error created a $2.2 million-dollar difference and their
bid had to be withdrawn. So that sets us then with bidder B and bidder D, and a
cost of $18.75 for construction only which is well above what our engineering
estimate for construction was. At this time, we’re doing an extensive
evaluation. We’re looking at, is the project potentially too large? You’re
looking at very specific firms that can handle a project of this size. Is it
possibly too complex? We have gravity sections of sewer, low-pressure sewer,
we’re asking them to directional drill in areas that may not be necessary.
Wetlands, railroad crossing, rock removal, potentially are all the contractors
too busy…with all of the state grants and business that’s occurring in NY? Or,
are the state requirements a deterrent from others bidding? There’s a 23%
requirement that they use minority and women-owned businesses on the project,
wage rates are higher, so we’re looking at all of these different pieces. We
also took every single line item and we did an evaluation of where we saw
discrepancies from our estimates and the bids we received. And by every single
line item, its sheets and sheets of items, it’s not just ten, its hundreds. So,
these were the items where we saw larger discrepancies, on the maintenance and
protection of traffic, drilling, service caps on everyone’s connection point,
the general mobilization line, and site restoration. And we do have a rather
large team: the Town of Ballston, Clifton Park, Saratoga County Sewer District
is involved, the town engineer, and EFC.
Goslin: “I’d like to comment if
I could. First of all, on behalf of the town of Ballston, I do have to say
we’re obviously very disappointed with the bid results. This, for a large group
of people in the town, has been a 5-year effort and to not be in a position
where we can move forward with this project currently is a very difficult
position and not the position, we obviously wanted to be in. Having said that,
ya know, we could wring our hands, we could go out and find some people to
blame and some things to blame and some of that’s already been done, but I
think that the best thing to do moving forward is to take a step back, look at
where we are, look at our options, and as a town and as a board, make a
decision to choose how to move forward. So, with that in mind, we met several
weeks ago as a group and a lot of the people that Kim mentioned were there. We
brought in the town engineer, CT Male, Adirondack Engineering, the county was
there, the town of Clifton Park was there, our attorneys were there, and we said,
‘how do we move forward?’ And the sum of that evening was to the engineering
firms involved and that would be Adirondack, CT Male and Kim is an engineer as
well….to go out to the contractors and try to determine…or try to see what they
could learn. In other words, understand what might have happened, and umm, I’m
gonna tell ya that I’ve seen the preliminary results of that, and about
everything is in there, ok? There are some estimates that could have been
better, yeah there are some estimates that may have been low, and some estimates
that were spot on. There are overhead figures that are out there, there are
rock, there’s wetlands, there’s small roads, there’s market conditions, there’s
overtime, there’s traffic control, there’s yada yada yada. You name it, it’s in
there.. OK? So, what we’re going to do with that is we’re going to summarize
that document so that the public can see it and we also asked the engineering
firms to write a letter based on what they have observed and who we’ve spoken
to and suggest paths forward by the town. So probably by the next meeting Tim
we will have a report on what we’ve learned, we will have recommendations from
three different engineering firms and then it begins the town determining what
they may want to do. Alright? Right now the options moving forward are we could
do nothing, we could sit right where we are , we have a lot of things that
we’ve accomplished , we can put those in a time capsule , we can put in the
design, we can put in all of the easements, all of that, we can give $1.7
million back to the state, we can do that and just walk away and say ya know
what? Sewers around Ballston Lake are just too expensive. And they are
expensive. We didn’t miss this one by a little, we missed it by a lot. The
other thing people are thinking about is you could re-bid this as a smaller
project. Some people think that these size of the project may scare away some
smaller vendors, or smaller contractors, and the sum of the parts may be less
than the whole. That’s certainly an option. The …ummm…you could divide this
larger sewer district up into smaller districts. You could say Buell Heights is
one, the West side, the East side, the town of Clifton Park…that’s an option.
So that if you did go out to bid you could build the sections that make sense
from a cost point of view. And I think there’s a lot of other alternatives
there. One of the things that’s been suggested to me, and maybe its time for
the town to take a step back and look at some of the other ideas that we’ve
received and maybe study those before we look at moving forward. So at this
point in time I’d just like to summarize where I think the town is that A.)
we’re obviously disappointed, (B) we’re trying to learn as much as we can from
the bids we got back, we’re looking for some engineering recommendations, we
still have $1.7 million of state money, we’ll talk to EFC later in the week
about how that money could be used, I’d hate to give that money back, but we
really need to take a step back and try to figure out where we are and figure
out what the best way to move forward is for the town and I would just state to
everybody her that umm…that this isn’t something that they need to decide
today, tomorrow or next week, the money ….a lot of the money and the funding is
out there for 10 years. There’s a lot of opportunity for us as a town to really
take a step back and see where we are. We should have more at the next board
meeting.”
Szczepaniak: “Well stated
councilman. One thing I want to add to that is the easements…all the work…that
was performed already, I checked with our attorney Deb Kaelin about that, in
other words, how long does an easement that’s been granted last, and …”
Kaelin: “It runs through the
land”.
Szczepaniak: “So, that’s
another good aspect if the project does get shelfed.”
Stewart: Has two questions,
the first is that as a town board they are responsible to do something when a
water body is deemed impaired and she wants to hear from Kim and have Kim
explain what responsibility the board has and what action the board must take
to satisfy their responsibility. The second question is what is the percentage
of septic systems around the lake that are failing? How do we determine what
systems are failing?
Kim: “I would do the TMDL
first (Total Maximum Daily Load). So, what the state would be looking at would
be specifically phosphorous, and they would want you to do studies as to how
much that lake can handle of phosphorous, and what are all of your sources of
phosphorous? And eventually you have to look at all of your sources of
phosphorous and say ‘you’re allowed from your streams to have so much coming
in, umm…and how are you going to measure it, so this is a very difficult thing,
from your runoff, from your septics, you figure out all of your sources and you
would assign what is your maximum allowed into the lake from each source. So,
looking at that amount that is healthy for the lake, this would take years to
really create that TMDL. There are other water bodies in NY state that are
going thru this process with DEC. And then once you have the TMDL created it
takes even additional years for it to bounce back. It’s a very lengthy
process.”
Stewart:” Generally, to bounce
back, something needs to change.”
Kim: “Yes. So, what it would
mean for the community is that permit limits would be set on each of these
sources which means people would literally have to change how they function, so
these sources don’t continue to contribute. And then your other question is how
many septics are contributing and how do you measure that? And this is a
committee that Dave and I, we go to the county on a certain frequency, we meet
with them, that they’re really trying to beef up the septic monitoring and
education process in Saratoga County and that would involve more inspections of
people’s homes , how they take care of their systems, eventually , and this is
a comment I heard from EFC is ‘do you have documentation on file where people
have bumped into situations where they need help? ‘And right now, that
documentation is lacking. The Finger Lakes they told me, go look at them, they
took their building inspectors and they trained them in septic technology so
that they go out and inspect everybody’s homes. So, it’s not an easy solution
that way, either. “
There was discussion on
possibly creating a Septic Use Law.
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