Highland balks at wastewater project price tag

After considering multiple bids exceeding $1.2 million, the Highland school board unanimously agreed to delay plans to install a wastewater treatment plant at the middle school and high school during its Monday night meeting.

The move came a month after the school board tabled the project for the same reason, citing the skyrocketing price of supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We rejected all the bids,” Superintendent Ken Crawford said. “We were hoping the project would be closer to $800,000-$900,000. We feel that with increasing costs and timelines that this project turned into too big of a price tag for us.”

Board members hoped the Department of Natural Resources — which mandated the project in 2019 citing above-acceptable levels of E. coli and ammonia in the school’s wastewater — would be sympathetic to the circumstances.

“ (Our engineer) has been in contact with them before, and he feels like they’ll accept our extension knowing that we have tried to get the project done early,” Crawford said. “We’ve tried to save up the money for it, we’ve done everything by the letter of the law. They appreciate that, so we believe that they’ll extend it so we can wait for prices to come down and find a number that’s a little more agreeable.”

While the district was also given the option of laying a sewage line to the city wastewater plant seven miles away, Crawford said that approach had a steeper price around $1.5 million.

Crawford said the district would file for a five-year extension from the current July 2022 deadline but hoped to pick the project back up within a year.

“We want to get it done as fast as we can to get it off our plate, off our books,” he said. “But if we have to wait out a little bit of the price increase for now and wait a year or two, that’s fine as well.”