The Storm Lake City Council approved a change order for the Memorial Road resurfacing project, adding 7.2% to the $3.1 million undertaking. 

The city council unanimously approved a $226,000 change order to the Memorial Road project last Monday after a presentation by Assistant City Manager Dave Derragon. Councilperson Meg McKeon said she was “relieved” that the change order was requested by the city, not the contractor, Reding’s Gravel and Excavating of Algona, who has been working on the project since March. 

“I will say I was relieved to hear the change order was at our request and not the contractor,” McKeon said before the 5-0 vote. 

Derragon responded: “I felt that was important.” The comment elicited laughs from the five council members, who were seated in a contentious meeting in March over the competency of the two low bidders of Memorial Road. The bidders, Hulstein Excavating of Edgerton, Minn., and Bainbridge Construction of Kingsley, threatened litigation after the city council rejected their bids — city administration claimed they filed “irresponsible” bids. At the time, Mayor Mike Porsch said the city’s issues with contractors have increased in the past few years. 

The city plans to fund the $226,000 increase through wastewater revenue. City Manager Keri Navratil described the change order as “nominal.”

The change order calls for a bypass assembly at the Scout Park Lift Station while a temporary conveyance is in place. The assembly means contractors also have to construct a temporary pumping system that will snake through the Buena Vista University campus starting this week. Josh Pope, an engineer with the city’s engineering firm, Bolton & Menk of Spencer, said the change order was prompted by the city’s receipt of a $3 million wastewater improvement grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 

The Memorial Road project didn’t account for the Scout Park Lift Station improvements, which were paid for by the FEMA grant. When the Memorial Road project was designed, the city didn’t have the grant. Navratil said it was impossible to design the project as though the FEMA grant was already in hand — it wasn’t. 

Navratil and Pope both said the temporary conveyance system will remain on campus for four to five weeks. The city collaborated with the university to ensure the system would not overlap with the arrival of students in mid-August. 

“That was to basically perform a different routing of that temporary piping in order to accommodate everything going in place for the bypass assembly,” Pope said. 

Pope said the university did not want the piping to intersect the center of campus, so engineers worked to circumvent the middle of university property. 

“We’ll come from the lift station, head east and then start to go south, right next to the football field,” Pope said. “Then we’ll come back and loop around to Third Street.”

The actual bypass assembly will be constructed on the existing Scout Park Lift Station force main — a pipeline that conveys wastewater under pressure from one discharge side to another. The current force main travels down all of Lakeshore Drive from the Scout Park location to the Memorial Lift Station site. 

The city signed a contract with Reding’s Excavating of Storm Lake this past March for the resurfacing and stormwater project. Additionally, a proposed Kwik Star convenience store and gas station development is expected to increase traffic within the Memorial Road corridor, particularly at its intersection with Lakeshore Drive. The city and contractor aim to improve the road’s structural capacity in order to accommodate the anticipated increase in traffic loading. 

“The catalyst was that once the Kwik Star development was proposed and everything worked out, that enabled us to leverage different funding mechanisms that, at that point, made it cost effective to reconstruct the road,” Pope said. 

Pope said he has heard from property owners along the Memorial Road passageway who have expressed “interest in doing redevelopment of their own properties, which would also increase traffic.”

Pope said he was unsure of when the Kwik Star development would be completed. The city must complete Memorial Road by the end of November. Pope said the project remains on schedule. 

The Memorial Road project will replace the gravel roadway with a new concrete and gutter roadway. It will also construct a new storm system in an attempt to minimize potential flooding events. The planned storm sewer will discharge all the area from Tyson and the high school to the southeast corner of the city.