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Commissioners to award contracts for $10.6 million Kinsman sewer project
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Trumbull County commissioners are poised to award two contracts totaling $7.4 million today to begin construction of the $10.6 million Kinsman Phase 2 sewer project.
It’s the biggest and most- challenging sewer project Commissioner Frank Fuda has worked on during his nearly eight years in office.
“This was the toughest thing I ever did,” Fuda said of getting the federal funding needed to make the project affordable for the 343 affected homes and businesses in the Kinsman Center, Farmdale and Kinsman Township areas.
County officials secured tentative approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2009 to provide 75 percent of the money for the project and a low- interest loan for the rest. But the USDA indicated later that the funding no longer was available, Fuda said.
The commissioners enlisted the help of U.S. Sens. Sherrod Brown and Rob Portman, U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan of Niles and former U.S. Rep. Steven C. LaTourette of Madison to help complete the funding package, Fuda said.
He and officials in the Trumbull County Sanitary Engineer’s Office and Trumbull County lobbyist Michael Verich traveled to Washington about this time last year to secure the USDA funding, Fuda said.
One of the first votes Fuda cast during his first month in office in January 2006 was one that approved Phase 1 of the project, which installed 2,000 feet of sewers and a treatment plant to serve three commercial customers.
One part of Phase 2, costing $1,551,440, will create additional waste-treatment facilities. It will be awarded today to Utility Contracting Inc. of Youngstown.
A $5,888,000 contract will be awarded to Marucci and Gaffney Excavating of Youngstown to extend sewer lines in a half-mile radius of Kinsman Center and Farmdale.
Fuda said he thinks some Kinsman-area residents questioned whether the project would ever happen because of the relatively small number of people to be served and the large cost.
“We kind of fooled them. We didn’t give up,” Fuda said.
The project is one of the larger ones included in a 2007 consent agreement signed by the county commissioners and Environmental Protection Agency that obligated the county to extend sewers to certain low-income areas with inadequate septic systems.
When the Kinsman project is completed, the county will have finished about $52 million of the projects, with about $41 million left.
Kinsman residents are paying about 20 percent of the project with the USDA and several state grants paying the rest.
The contracts will be awarded at a 10:30 a.m. meeting at the Trumbull County Sanitary Engineer’s Office, 842 Youngstown-Kingsville Road, Vienna.