St. Clairsville to spend $6.2M on Phase 2 of water line project
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ST. CLAIRSVILLE - The city of St. Clairsville is continuing work on replacing water line infrastructure throughout the city and awarded a Hopedale-based company a contract to do it.
During Monday's council meeting, council approved an ordinance that authorized service director Scott Harvey to execute the notice of award entering into a contract between the city and Border Patrol LLC for Phase 2 of the city's water distribution systems improvements.
Law director Joe Vavra said that the winning bid was for $6,202,879.99 -- the lowest bid.
"About a month ago, the project was put out to bid. The city received a number of bids back and they opened those bids and addressed all of the bids. I believe it was September 28th when they did that," Vavra said. "Based on reviewing the bids they agreed to accept the lowest and best bid to complete phase two of that project."
Harvey said Phase 1 was completed in Feb. 2025, costing $8.2 million.
Phase 1 saw 40% of the city’s water distribution system get replaced.
He said that Phase 1 replaced the eastern and western sides of the city's water lines. Phase 2 will replace the northern section of the city's water lines. Phase 3 will focus on replacing the southern section of the city's water lines which will complete the infrastructure project.
Harvey said that Phase 2 will start Jan. 2027 and will take roughly a year and a half to complete.
"We're currently just getting into the design phase of 3. We’ll clean up that last 20% in phase 3 and it’s more like a $3-$4 million project, so it's a smaller scale compared to the other two," Harvey said. "We’ve got about a year to design this, get a permit, and then we’ll start chasing funding. Whether it be grants or loans, at this point, we don’t know yet."
He hopes to get a quicker start on Phase 3 and have no gap between Phases 2 and 3.
"Hopefully we can finish 2 and then maybe six months later, get into 3 then wrap the whole thing around 2029," Harvey said.
Harvey noted the water lines exceed their maximum useful life, saying not every small crack split or leak in a water line is visible to the public.
"That’s just water that continuously is lost that's not metered so you can’t sell it," Harvey said. "The EPA likes us to be under 30% of water loss so part of our solution is water line change outs."
He added that once the infrastructure project is complete, the city will be looking forward to replacing its existing water treatment plant, which is a hundred years old.
"We can already see that it’s nearing its end of life. We’d like to get to the new water treatment plant by 2031 or 2032," Harvey said. "That would complete our entire water system."