Fort Council seeks flow test on wastewater system

FORT RECOVERY - Fort Recovery councilors learned this week that a plan to overhaul the village's wastewater treatment system has been put on hold pending further testing.

Instead, village administrator Aaron Rengers said Monday he thinks the next best step would be to conduct a flow study of the village lagoons.

"We met with Kleinfelder on June 2, (and we) had a very productive meeting," he said. "We're currently kind of on pause with the whole lagoon system. Their number came back way too high. We all know that we can't afford a $9 million plant or $12 million plant, whatever they were proposing. But, I kind of recommended maybe a flow study would make more sense. They had our maximum daily flow at like 3.2 million gallons and I just think there's no way we ever have a need for 3.2 million gallons. I could be way off on that, that's kind of the reason they sized the way they did is, we have two channels and each channel would handle 1.8 million gallons of flow, so our flow can't be more than our water put out."

The village's water plant produces 250,000 gallons of water daily, so even in the event of rain, Rengers said, the max amount of water through the plant is 750,000 gallons.

"Our pumps have ran inefficiently for years. I mean we've had issues with Railroad Street, we've had issues with East Pump Station and we've had issues with North Lane, which we currently have issues with," he said. "I think yesterday that pump ran for 700 minutes, so obviously it's not pumping that entire time. It's just running very inefficiently. It's pumping a lot of air, so it's hard to judge how much flow you're getting from that just on runtime alone. And we don't have a flow meter that we can see that."

Mayor Dave Kaup said a flow study should have been conducted earlier, and expressed frustration with Kleinfelder's work.

"I haven't been impressed with Kleinfelder either, but that's my opinion. It's a little frustrating when you spend $50,000 on wells and you absolutely get nothing," Kaup said.

At the village council's regular meeting on May 18, Rengers said Kleinfelder, a Defiance-based engineering firm, sent him an engineer's estimate of $9.67 million to overhaul the village's wastewater treatment system on May 8.

The estimate was nearly double the expected project price of $5.75 million.

Rengers advised he would work on getting an estimate for the flow study.

In other business, councilors discussed a request from H.A. Dorsten, a Minster-based construction company, to shut down a portion of North Wayne Street in front of Kaup Pharmacy and the Fort Recovery Morvilius Opera House from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. June 22 to July 10 for work at the opera house.

"H.A. Dorsten wants to close down North Wayne Street on the bricks between the opera house … basically right in front of the opera house," Rengers said. "There must be a steel beam that wasn't installed that they want to install now for the opera house. So they want to close it for roughly three weeks every day."

Originally, he added, the company wanted to close down State Route 119 and bring in a crane to do the work. They now plan to complete the work using a telehandler.

"He said he was hoping to have it done before that, but this guy from H.A. Dorsten called me, and he said 'I hope to have it done in two weeks, three weeks should be plenty of time. I'm not going to say two weeks, because then if it's not done and it takes three weeks, then you got a lot of people upset,'" Rengers said.

Kaup said closing that specific portion of North Wayne Street would cause a lot of headaches, as it's one of the village's main streets.

"Make a phone call and say, 'I think that's asking a lot to have our main street closed for three weeks out of our summer,' he said. "I mean three weeks sounds like a long time."

Rengers advised he should be able to set a meeting up between him, an H.A. Dorsten representative and police chief Jared Laux to discuss the request further.

Also on Wednesday, councilors approved an emergency resolution authorizing village financial officer Jennifer Schoonover to apply for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources' NatureWorks grant.

Schoonover said the county will be allocated $33,904 in grant funds, which could be split between its municipalities, or all go to Fort Recovery, depending on applications.

"It just depends on who applies for it. There's a 25% match so we would have to kick in a little bit of money and we're thinking that maybe (we could use the funds for) like a liner or something for the pool," she said. "It's not going to do a whole pool renovation or anything like that, but maybe something that'll help us out a little bit."

The council meets next at 7:30 p.m. July 6 in council chambers.