WILTON – The Selectboard has scheduled a special town meeting for Oct. 20 to approve a combined grant and loan funding package for the wastewater construction project. The special town meeting will be held at 7 p.m. at the Academy Hill School, with the regular Selectboard meeting to follow.
An overhaul of the town’s wastewater system was planned years ago and organized into two phases. Phase I, approved by voters at the 2011 town meeting and completed last year, upgraded the water system’s pump stations and the headworks at the plant. Phase II will renovate the internal processes of the treatment plant itself.
Phase II renovations, approved by voters at the 2012 annual town meeting, includes replacing systems that remove grit, chop up the waste and generally treat the outgoing water. The rotating biological contactor, or RBC, which removes pollutants from the water, will have two of four units replaced and another two added to the system. Other improvements include replacing the screw pumps, the system that removes grit from the water, the grinder, the sludge pumps and the final clarifiers, which provide a space for material suspended in the water to settle and be removed. The project would also relocate the sludge dewatering screen to its own room and expand the sludge composting facilities.
The construction start on the Phase II plant upgrade was delayed due to a much longer amount of time needed for project development. Construction is not expected to start until next spring and the final phase of the project is expected to take nearly 2 years to complete.
Three bids for the project were opened on Aug. 7. William Olver with Olver Associates of Winterport, the engineering firm that has been working with the town on the project, reported that the low bidder was Penta Corp of Marlborough, N.H. at $9,549,000. That bid is less than a $9.7 million project estimate but will outstrip the funding the town had organized years earlier though the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development program.
The special town meeting will ask residents if they wish to utilize a $2.75 million loan and a $1.35 million grant through the USDA Rural Development program. Town Manager Rhonda Irish said that wastewater treatment plant plans and details about the funding will be available at the meeting.
The special town meeting on Oct. 20 should not be confused with the special election that the Selectboard also scheduled Tuesday evening, for Jan. 5, 2015. That election will fill a vacancy on the Selectboard.
