Sep. 13—The condition of the city’s roads was an issue in the summer’s municipal election campaigns, but Decatur Utilities and the city have a plan to address streets torn up for the sanitary sewer rehabilitation.
Jimmy Evans, Water & Wastewater Operations superintendent, said the utility has set aside $2.35 million in the last three years from the $165 million sewer rehabilitation bond issue to repair these streets.
Evans said the utility began setting aside the money when “the city agreed to take over the paving/patching work for all of DU’s work.”
He estimated that about 150 streets so far need repairing following the utility’s sewer project. This doesn’t include streets damaged during the normal course of DU’s daily work.
City Council President Jacob Ladner, who serves as liaison with DU, said Decatur Utilities pays the city, and then the city uses the contractor it hires on its annual paving contract to repair any cuts the utility makes throughout the year.
In 2022, the city and Decatur Utilities agreed to the contract in which the city would take over the additional volume from DU-related repairs. This allows for much better pricing that the utility can obtain alone.
“Basically, wherever they cut or do the pipe-bursting they turn over those streets or sections of streets over to the city,” Ladner said. “And then it’s really up to us to get it resurfaced. DU then pays for the project.”
Pipe bursting refers to a method of trenchless sewer repair that replaces old underground pipes, which were mostly clay, by forcing the existing pipe to burst by feeding the new high-density polyethylene pipe through and into its place. The old pipe breaks as the new pipe is pushed or pulled through it, and the fragments are left in the soil.
The city’s management of paving repairs was meant to improve the city’s communication with Decatur Utilities so as to avoid past issues of DU damaging recently paved roads.
Evans pointed out DU “only covers the cost of permanent paving repair to the areas of street affected by the utility’s work, not the entire street.”
Ladner said the city recently was repairing Duncansby Drive Southwest.
Evans said there are nine months remaining on the final two contracts that will wrap up the accelerated portion of the wastewater system rehab program.
“However, we will continue to perform annual sewer rehab at a normalized pace,” Evans said.
Mayor Tab Bowling said the city has done about $3 million in resurfacing in fiscal 2024. This paving included repairs to a lot of those DU cuts, but the repairs weren’t documented, he said.
“We’re working on the right process as far as making sure the documentation is done to show that those cuts were addressed,” Bowling said.
Bowling said the city needs to do an inventory of what DU submitted, what the city has done and what’s remaining.
In 2021, DU borrowed $165 million and increased customer rates to fund multiple sewer rehabilitation projects.
The primary focus of this rehab work is to target the areas of the sewer system in the worst condition that were contributing to rain-induced sanitary sewer overflows during periods of heavy rainfall.
DU agreed to pay a $123,000 civil penalty in March 2021 because of the city’s problems with sewer overflows as part of a legal settlement with Tennessee Riverkeepers, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and the state Attorney General’s Office.
Decatur Utilities has had 22 rain-induced sewer overflows since March 2022, all of which occurred during a heavy rainfall in February of this year.
DU’s original plan was to replace 1 million linear feet of pipe, including 800,000 feet of clay pipe and 200,000 feet of cement pipe, in 10 years. It also included replacing the Clark Springs collector and lift station 7 at the Pines in Northwest Decatur.
However, DU chose last year to change the direction of the project after the completion of additional engineering analysis. They reallocated money to projects of higher priority.
These projects include spending $22.62 million on the installation of a new Moulton Street collector and a 60-inch sewer main to upgrade from 20- and 24-inch mains.
They also are replacing aging gravity sewer as part of the replacement of the influent pump station and headworks facilities at Decatur Utilities’ wastewater treatment plant, located on Alabama 20 at the Tennessee River, next to Ingalls Harbor, for $90.5 million.
With the new plan, they had to reduce by half the amount of pipe replacement that is being funded with the original bond issue. DU officials said they plan to continue any remaining sewer main replacement as part of their routine annual work.
— bayne.hughes@decaturdaily.com or 256-340-2432