City OKs contract for preliminary engineering report on wastewater plant replacement

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Sandpoint leaders took their latest major step toward replacing the city’s aging and obsolete wastewater treatment plant on Aug. 7, unanimously approving a contract with Keller Associates to prepare a preliminary engineering report for the project.

“This is a really exciting step for us; it’s monumental, actually,” Mayor Jeremy Grimm said.

“Yeah, this is a big deal,” said City Engineering Brandon Staglund. “I’ve been waiting for this since I was a kid.”

Staglund summarized the purpose of the preliminary engineering report, saying Keller will be tasked with evaluating “the feasibility of replacing the wastewater treatment plant, develop strategies, some preliminary planning and scheduling, and some help trying to find money to do it.”

Keller’s contract with the city is for $431,920, which includes project management, the preliminary engineering report itself, support for finding funding, looking at geotechnical feasibility and conducting a topographical survey.

Overall, the wastewater treatment plant project is estimated to cost from $60 million to $100 million — what Grimm described during a recent tour of the facility as “the largest public works project outside of the byway in Bonner County history.”

Kyle Meschko, of the Coeur d’Alene office of Keller, keyed in on the financial lift that will be required to complete the project.

“One of the biggest challenges we will have moving forward is figuring out how we’re going to fund this and that’s the biggest question mark,” he told the council. “That might be substantially more complicated than the engineering, honestly.”

Nonetheless, the company — which Grimm noted is based in Idaho and does more than 70% of its business in the state — has experience with helping other communities fund similarly expensive projects.

However, as Councilor Kyle Schreiber pointed out during the Aug. 7 meeting, Keller hasn’t always gotten along with its municipal clients. He pointed to reporting in the Bonner County Daily Bee from October 2023, when the company butted heads with Moyie Springs over work on a sewer system that ran over budget and required redesign work that Keller wanted to be reimbursed for. City officials, however, declined to pay for the overage.

According to the paper, additional funds ran to more than $386,000 due to “unforeseen inflation of construction costs,” on top of costs for “additional engineering planning and work already completed and paid for.”

Schreiber said that while he’s “also excited to see this project moving forward” — and voted in favor of approving the contract — he asked Meschko if “we have a plan to keep this project on budget? Because even just a couple percentage points on a project this big could be a pretty large amount.”

For instance, the Moyie Springs project started at about $3 million, but rose to $7.5 million, because of redesigns after city officials did away with a number of buildings from the facility. 

According to the Bee’s reporting, “Members of the city council likened the request for money to a shakedown from Keller, now that the city has received additional funding and taken on debt from multiple state agencies in order to pay for the project that has now risen to more than double the original cost.”

Meschko reiterated that construction costs “doubled” during the COVID-19 pandemic, and inflationary pressures have since kept costs high. However, “It’s in our best interest to make sure that the budgeting and planning is captured early on so that it sets the city up for success,” he said, pointing to coordination with contractors and independent reviews on cost estimation.

“Things have doubled and it becomes very, very difficult to estimate that early on,” said Meschko, who was identified as the manager of the Moyie Springs project, later adding, “there’s never been a pandemic like this.”

Councilors were enthusiastic about approving the contract.

“I will simply tell you that I was shocked at the state of decay in the wastewater treatment facility and so I am very, very excited to see us as a city moving this project forward,” said Councilor Rick Howarth, referring to his recent tour of the plant. “I know that there’s much better technology now; I know that we can get rid of the smell. It will help the whole city, the image of the city, and so thank you for pushing it forward.”

Council President Deb Ruehle likened the current facility to a ruin.

“It’s kind of like when you go back East and you go to Gettysburg; it’s like that historical [place], going in and checking it all out,” she said. “It’s kind of fun and exciting, so I sort of love the sewage treatment plant, but I’m looking forward to having a nice, shiny new one.”

During a tour in late July, Grimm said the preferred timeline for completing the project is three-and-a-half years, requiring local, state and federal dollars, with the city considering both grant and loan monies. In addition, Grimm said City Hall will be going to the public for bonding authority in the next year.

“I recognize it’s a huge amount of money,” he said at the time. 

Now that the contract for the preliminary engineering report has been greenlit by the council, the city’s next step is to submit a letter of interest by Jan. 1 in order to go to the state for funding requests. The implementation phase could begin from 12 to 16 months from now, but it’s still to be determined whether the work will take place structure by structure or include a full teardown and rebuild.

“In my mind, the key things we need to understand is this an incremental, piecemeal replacement or is it a whole package, turn-key replacement?” Grimm said Aug. 7, later adding, “It’s a tough timeline.”