The City of Great Bend’s on-call engineer, Josh Golka from Professional Engineering Consultants, says the waterline replacement project is approximately 60 percent complete.

The waterline improvement has a total budget of $6,452,196, of the total $5,171,625 has been allocated to the project and well improvements. The remaining budget of $1,280,571 is available for additional improvements. Golka received permission from the Great Bend City Council for a change order of $294,597 for extra modifications.

Golka says there are about 30 service lines they want to modify the configuration, specifically concrete or brick meter vaults that need to be replaced that APAC Kansas was hoping to reuse.

Josh Golka Audio

Golka felt the remaining balance after the deduction of the change order would still be enough for additional costs going forward.

APAC has until March of 2019 to finish the project that is replacing roughly 40,000 linear feet of pipe, but Golka noted the crew is currently months ahead of schedule and hoped to be done by late fall or early winter of 2018.

Josh Golka Audio

Golka says APAC works in three crews with a drilling crew that handles the main installation, a service crew that does the line switchovers, and a restoration crew to repave the street.