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Fort Wayne will use consultants to help manage its $240 million federally mandated plan to reduce the amount of sewage flowing to area rivers.
The Fort Wayne City Council on Tuesday unanimously supported spending more than $2 million to hire three firms to help City Utilities manage its increased workload from the federal plan. The contracts are with Malcolm Pirnie for $1.4 million, CH2MHill for $540,000 and DLZ Indiana for $287,000.
The council will have a final vote on the contracts next week.
Matthew Wirtz, City Utilities deputy director for engineering, said the firms were needed to help manage an avalanche of work the city must do over the next several years to comply with the federally mandated consent decree.
For example, he said from 2011 through 2014, the city expects to spend more than $25 million a year on such projects. The city spent less than $10 million on those projects this year.
“It’s a significant increase to our workload,” he said.
Wirtz said the city’s current staff can’t handle that much work, so the companies were hired to provide temporary help. He said the contracts are for an estimated 15,000 hours of work for next year and will include three or four full-time employees working with the city plus other help as needed.
The consultants are needed next year because design work for the construction is typically done a year in advance.
They will all have employees working locally as well as help train city staff and local firms on some of the work being done for the city.
The council approved a plan to raise sewer rates 86 percent through 2013 to finance projects to reduce the amount of sewage that flows into the city’s rivers during heavy rains.
Wirtz said the contracts were included as part of that rate increase.
Councilman Tim Pape, D-5th, questioned whether the city was getting the best price for the work. He said because the city is offering so much work, it might be able to negotiate better prices with consultants should it use longer-term contracts.
Wirtz said the plan is to use the firms for four years and the city hopes to be able to get even better rates for the final three years of the contract, which will come before the council next year.
