Faced with a likely scramble for qualified contractors, plus a December 2024 spending deadline, the Eatonton-Putnam Water and Sewer Authority board was chomping at the bit last week to seek bids for $6.1 million in water system improvements – but they do not yet know when the money will be available.
Half of the expenditure will come from the federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). The other half will come from local sources (EPWSA, $2 million; Putnam County Board of Commissioners, $600,000; City of Eatonton, $400,000). These local funding sources are committed and scheduled.
However, as discussed at last week’s EPWSA board meeting, the apparent bottleneck lies at the state level, where the governor’s Office of Planning and Budget has a four-member team reviewing each of the state’s counties’, cities’, or authorities’ work proposals against federal eligibility guidelines.
“We haven’t heard anything, except that it’s ‘under review,’” said ESG engineer Charles Bridges, who recommended the board give the state “another couple of weeks.”
The board postponed its final decision on issuing a call for bids until its mid-July meeting.
However, the board did give the go-ahead for ESG staff to begin the first step in the process: a complete and up-to-date mapping of the system and modeling of the necessary water line sizes.
Part of the mapping will include the locations of manholes, which may number as many as 2,000, said Brice Doolittle, local ESG manager for EPWSA. The board authorized the staff to identify and rebuild the worst 10 manhole structures in the system, mostly in Eatonton’s downtown area.