The Tarrant Regional Water District board is set to vote Tuesday on a contract of up to $107.1 million to replace an aging stretch of its Cedar Creek pipeline, and on doubling a short-term borrowing program to $800 million to keep pace with a construction plan staff put at $2.3 billion over five years.
The board meets at 9 a.m. Oct. 20 in its board room at 800 E. Northside Drive in Fort Worth. The district's water bonds are repaid from contracts with Fort Worth, Arlington, Mansfield and the Trinity River Authority, according to the bond resolutions in the meeting packet.
A pipeline past its useful life
The contract would go to BAR Constructors for the first phase of the Cedar Creek Section 4 replacement, which runs from the Trinity River to the Cedar Creek Lake pump station.
The district's agenda memo says the existing line was built more than 50 years ago, is at the end of its useful life and has had joint failures that electromagnetic inspection tools cannot detect ahead of time. Because the route crosses flood-prone ground, a break during a long flood "could halt operations for months until waters recede and repairs can begin," the memo says.
BAR would build a new 90-inch steel pipeline alongside the old 72-inch concrete one and abandon more than eight miles of the old pipe, most of it laid in open trench with three tunnels. The larger pipe would also raise how much water the line can move.
Work at the lake pump station includes new discharge piping and flow meters, a water quality analyzer building and removal of the old chlorine and ammonia tanks.
Four firms submitted proposals. BAR's $107,110,641 price was the lowest and scored highest, 97 of 100 points, ahead of bids from McKee Utility Contractors at $113.5 million, Harper Brothers Construction at $122.3 million and SJ Louis Construction of Texas at $123.3 million. The engineer's estimate was about $129.3 million.
