Supervisors received bids from seven companies Thursday competing to handle approximately 800 feet of slope repairs at Oktibbeha County Lake, and all seven bids came in under a July estimate forecasting costs at about $1.5 million.
No action was taken on the seven bids, which ranged from almost $700,000-$1.2 million. Supervisors are expected to name a bid winner at their Monday meeting.
Tremont-based Cadamy Contracting submitted the lowest lump sum bid of $693,324, while the next lowest bid — $892,319 — came from Century Construction.
If supervisors accept the Cadamy bid, the county could be on the hook for about 20 percent of the bill.
District 3 Supervisor Marvell Howard confirmed funds from the Natural Resources Conservation Service will pay for about 83 percent of the total project. The remaining 17 percent — almost $118,000 — would come from local funding sources.
Howard said Oktibbeha County qualified for external funding because of the project’s designation as an emergency need.
“It’s always a plus when [bids] come in a lot less than what we estimated they’d be,” he said.
Thursday’s bid opening represents Oktibbeha County’s first step toward solving numerous structural issues with what could become a three-phase project.
A portion of the lake’s levee running alongside a state aid road connecting Highways 82 and 389 shows signs of excessive slope failures. In February, County Engineer Clyde Pritchard said rapid drawdowns — when the lake’s water level rises and falls drastically in a short amount of time – could have caused the failures.
Since then, the county has drained a significant amount of water from the lake in an attempt to alleviate pressure on the levee and to better study and inspect the structure.
Thursday’s bidding process aims to hire a contractor to repair those specific failures.
County Lake Road is expected to remain open during the construction process. A timeline for those repairs was not announced yesterday.
Supervisors are also expected to bid out other projects, including repairs to the lake’s slide gate valve stem and its emergency spillway. Issues with water seepage must also be solved.
The county has yet to procure outside funding for the second and third anticipated phases, and Howard said neither qualify as emergency fixes for the NRCS stream.
In February, County Engineer Clyde Pritchard estimated the entire scope of lake issues could cost about $7-$8 million.
Carl Smith covers Starkville and Oktibbeha County for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter @StarkDispatch
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