Highland wastewater project hits snag with DNR

The Highland school district’s wastewater treatment project still is in a holding pattern.

At a special meeting Monday, Superintendent Ken Crawford told the school board that the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has, thus far, been reluctant to allow the district to modify its plans to bring down the cost of the project.

He said that project engineer Matt Wildman from HR Green reported that he still is waiting on a final decision from the DNR.

“Right now, the DNR will not approve the single redundancy system proposed by HR Green,” Crawford said. “It would be a precedent for the DNR to approve the plan as such, to which HR Green is trying to get the DNR to understand that approving this for a school district is much different than approving it for a municipality.”

Crawford said that the school district’s usage is much less than that of a municipality.

“The overall usage of our system is daily during the school year but not much, if anything, on the weekends,” he said. “And then during the summer, we have very little usage whatsoever.

“So just trying to get the DNR to approve a system with some variance to it is proving difficult.”

Bids for the project were opened up earlier this month. The three bids were:

• Keokuk Contractors — $1,260,678

• Boomerang Corp. — $1,219,218.50

• Woodruff Construction — $1,206,000

“$1.2 million is too much for us to handle,” Crawford said. “A single redundancy system would be $800,000-$900,000.”

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.

The DNR has given the district until July 2022 to complete the project.

“We can always file for an extension with the DNR,” Crawford said.