Highland board tables bids for wastewater project

The Highland school district’s wastewater treatment project is on hold for now.

At Monday’s school board meeting, all three bids for the project came in over the $1.2 million estimated cost.

“We tabled it at the request of our engineer, Matt Wildman from HR Green,” Superintendent Ken Crawford said Tuesday. “We’re hoping the (Department of Natural Resources) will work with us to bring down the cost to under $1.2 million.”

The three bids were:

• Keokuk Contractors — $1,260,678

• Boomerang Corp. — $1,219,218.50

• Woodruff Construction — $1,206,000

“All the bids were within $60,000 of each other,” Crawford said. “That tells us that there was some consistency with the input costs.

“If we make some adjustments to some of the building specs, we’re hoping the DNR can be a little more lenient.”

Crawford had previously expressed concerns that the bids may come in high because of the skyrocketing prices of supplies due to shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re not a municipality,” he said. “We can’t just raise rates. This takes money away from the kids.”

Crawford said that the DNR has given the district a July 2022 deadline to complete the project.

In early 2019, the district was notified by the DNR that the school exceeded the DNR-mandated levels set for ammonia in the wastewater for six months of 2018. The school also exceeds the limits for E. coli in the wastewater.