Members of the Fredonia Village Board discussed a “wish list” of infrastructure improvements the result of federal stimulus funding coming to county and local municipalities.

The talks occurred during a series of budget meetings taking place by the village board.

“We do have in our minds, in regards to the stimulus money that is coming, things that we can do to improve the infrastructure,” village board member EvaDawn Bashaw said.

Water Department head Chris Surma shared that his top items included a clean-out of the sludge well, the 24-inch line at the plant and the roof.

The water plant also received another proposal from a security company that would handle the security camera system at the reservoir, and it’s a lower price than the current system which is good in light of the village’s tight budget.

“If we went with this other plan we could take the security camera off of the capital project as we’d pay a monthly fee,” Surma said. “This would be smaller than the monthly fees that we’re paying the vendors now for the burglar alarms and everything that we have up there.”

BUDGET ITEM

There’s no capital projects assigned for the water plant in Fredonia’s upcoming budget. However, a $307,000 budget item for Monday’s upcoming village board meeting was a hot button issue at a budget review session this week.

The delay to the current project at the plant has fallen behind schedule and the village is starting to feel the brunt of that.

“The field change in regards to the delay in the project that they originally charged us $53,000, they reduced to $31,000,” Bashaw said. “This delay had other factors in it as far as the Vineyard Drive (pump station) and Dunkirk being able to hook up to us.”

“We couldn’t do the project until Vineyard Drive Pump Station was completed. There were engineering delays with the valves and variable speed drives on the motors,” Surma explained. “Then there were delays in shipping on some of that. There was a delay from the technicians for those companies, there were also a couple of changes by Mr. (Randy) Woodbury in Dunkirk (Dunkirk’s DPW Director), last-minute kinds of things where they wouldn’t allow the original volume per day.”

Surma said he assumed the village was going to get 500-700 gallons a minute, now it’s down to 300 with the setup that they have.

“Because we didn’t have our backup source of water, we couldn’t take the plant out of service and then the weather getting into the fall and winter seasons and taking the building apart wasn’t going to work either because it would have froze,” Surma said.

Board member James Lynden, however, wasn’t buying that reasoning — citing that there were several ways in which the village could have winterized the building so the project could have continued on.

“There’s so many ways to secure a building for the winter, which we had a mild winter, that doesn’t seem to be a very good excuse,” Lynden said. “There’s so many ways to prevent anything from freezing.”

“And then we would have had change orders for more heaters and all kinds of stuff,” Surma responded.

“But tens of thousands of dollars of delayed costs here as opposed to a little bit of extra heat for a month or two; they claimed they were going to get it done by the end of January,” Lynden added.

“I agree with you Jim,” Bashaw said. “I think the biggest cost that would be is the additional rent for the pod that’s down there that’s the office. It’s gone now, but there’s an additional couple hundred bucks. I think all of us are baffled by and really not willing to approve the payment of that field change and the engineers seem to think that that’s not unreasonable and we seem to think that it is.”

Surma agreed with the board and added that he felt the whole mess should have been taken up with the engineers of the project.

“I don’t know how many of us approached the engineer, but one thing I want to caution about is that on Monday’s meeting, that $307,000 resolution is on the agenda, if we approve that amount, we’ve paid that late fee,” Bashaw said. “I think that we should reduce the $307,000 by the contingency fee, their contingency fee went up to $70,000 and I think that we should approve that minus the $70,000 and approve $237,000.”