By Charla Wurm-Adams
cwurm@wbcowqel.com
Thursday’s Bucyrus City Council’s committee meetings ran the gamut from construction to sewer rates to swimming bans in the city reservoirs.
The Plymouth Street project is causing a bit of a two-step in funding because of the involvement of both federal and state agencies. Money already appropriated for work scheduled to be done by Brandsetter-Carroll will have to be unappropriated and then reappropriated for another contractor approved by the federal agencies involved.
The reason for the shuffling is that because of the involvement of a federal agency is that the work must be done by contractors approved by that agency and Brandsetter –Carroll was not. The city’s share of the project is $630,000 with the Ohio Department of Transportation picking up the rest.
However, AEP is saving the city about $100,000 by agreeing to move utility poles at no cost.
To help pay for EPA-mandated separation work on city sewers, the process was started to raise city sewer rates by 3 percent annually through 2021.
Finally, legislation will be coming that will ban swimming in the city reservoirs because of safety concerns.