Mason City council approves bid, contract for industrial park water main loop project

MASON CITY — The City Council in Mason City this week approved a bid and awarded a contract for the Taft Avenue Water Main Loop project that helps with the water infrastructure in the city’s industrial park.

City Administrator Aaron Burnett says one of the keys to landing new development in the industrial park is the water infrastructure. “We’re able to really provide I think redundancy and reliability and higher flows out to the industrial park area. We’ve seen just continued development, almost every single project on the industrial side, has a pretty heavy water component. When we go through those projects and those requests for proposals from the IEDA about development in the industrial park, the water is one of the first questions that comes out because most industries are going to have either heavy drinking water components or wastewater components.”

City Engineer Mark Rahm says this loop is part of the city’s water distribution plan and remodeling.  “This project is one that was identified because of development prospects in that area in the southwest, and now specifically even more directly towards the new annex area which is west of the UP railroad there. This main will tie in nicely with any development on that side of the tracks, provide services for those, increases our chance for development there.”

Rahm says the project will try to solve any future problems with the water supply available to that area.  “Our distribution plan identifies I think seven projects that are in there, and they range in all kind of dollar amounts. This one is a no-brainer. We want to loop this for redundancy. Not to get into a whole bunch of specifics, but we do have two different pressure zones in Mason City, and this will help us bring water in from the back side. We’ll have to study that and see how that behaves once we actually turn that on. We are going to have some adjusting to do on the west end, but this was a no-brainer. There’s other ones that we continue to look at and study as we look at possible developments coming in here.”

Summers’ Enterprise Incorporated of Masonville had the lowest bid at $1,986,402, about $700,000 under the engineer’s opinion of probable cost.