Calvert City is looking to continue its progress on a paved walking trail project that would eventually connect the city’s downtown the the area along U.S. Highway 62 leading into Kentucky Dam Village State Resort Park.
Calvert City Council on Monday approved change orders to the first phase of the project, which will connect Old Park and Memorial Park officials hope to have completed by this spring. Project engineers from Bacon, Farmer and Workman, the firm tapped to complete the project, say those changes come with a fairly substantial price tag, however. Project Manager Rick Sullivan told the council that cost estimates to improve drainage issues in Old Park came to more than expected at $61,000, up from the $35,000 initially anticipated. That figure brings the total cost of the first phase of construction to an estimated $638,000, a 14 percent increase from initial projections. The original contract amount, Sullivan said, was about $553,416.
“It’s complicated, and we feel like we’ve got a design there that will work,” Sullivan said. “And if the council would like to move forward with this change order, we need to order materials to move forward with the construction.”
Sullivan said costs were more than initially anticipated for a few reasons; in particular, he said engineers realized that the flow lines under the west entrance of the park were built backward, so that the inlet was functioning as the outlet, causing water to back up along 5th Avenue. In addition, the encroachment for the additional width of the path took up some of the capacity of the ditch and drainage, meaning existing pipe would need to be removed and repositioned.
The change order isn’t the first to affect the first phase of the project. Sullivan said the city requested corrected entrances on the east end of Old Park, which came to about of $23,729. The second change order also related to drainage along the trail.
“We had a lot of drainage as we actually got in to the construction and trying to better fit the field conditions, as we got in and actually did the work,” Sullivan said. “There were several drainage items that we felt like at that time we could install to make a lot of improvements that were difficult to see until we actually put our boots out there on the ground and got to looking at this thing with the contractors.”
Sullivan told the council full costs would have been about $664,967, however engineers anticipated about $27,000 savings in initial cost projections from items in the original contract that crews either did not have to do or were able to modify through other change orders.
Engineers are also working with the city to improve drainage issues in the parking lot of Memorial Park. Sullivan said crews were examining the property now to see what lay beneath the paving and hoped to have assessments complete in the next two weeks.
“We might, depending on how the pricing is or what the city decides they want to do, we might could fold this in to the same operation we’ve got going on out there now and try to get this thing maybe fixed up out there before winter,” Sullivan said. “If not, it’s certainly not a show stopper to leave the parking lot like it is, it’ll function just like it has been function. It’s something we don’t have to do, or the city doesn’t have to do at this time.”
Sullivan gave rough estimates of about $150,000 to make improvements to the parking lot, though no actual cost projections were available.
On trail drainage, Calvert City Mayor Lynn Jones emphasized that whatever the council chose to do, time was a significant factor.
“Time is important here,” Jones said. “We’re running into October, then before you know it Christmas is going to be here, and then it’s going to be February and we’re into the next part of the project. We need to get this buckled down.”
Councilman Jeremy Rowe said though it would prove more costly, the improvements were needed.
“These are long-term benefits that we get from this,” Rowe said. “I don’t want to get to the finish line and get chintzy.”
Councilwoman Tanara Babcock agreed, saying she would rather spend more now and avoid future problems.
“They’re here now, we might as well do it now rather than having them finish the job up and come back just to tear it all up again,” Babcock said.
The council voted 5-0 to approve the drainage work; Councilman Kevin Stokes was absent for Monday’s vote.
The city council also adopted its 2017 property tax rate ordinance during its Monday meeting. The city elected to take the compensating rate, which would generate as much as last year’s tax assessments, though individual rates were actually a little lower on real estate and personal property.
The tax ordinance will assess .244 cents per $100 of assessed value on real and personal properties, down from .248 cents last year. Assessed rates on motor vehicles and watercraft would be set at .25 cents per $100 of assessed property value, a rate that remains unchanged from the last year.
City Clerk and Treasurer Ralph Howard said during the Aug. 14 meeting that Calvert City’s total assessed property value was about $435 million. The city maintains a 99.2 percent collection rate.
In other business, the council reappointed Kurt Schmidt to serve on the city’s Fire Training Center board