Lily Dale is set to get new water mains after the Pomfret Town Board held a special meeting last week to approve a contractor.

E and R General Construction, Inc. of Blasdell will do the work. The town board authorized a $2,267,242 contract with the company.

Town Supervisor Dan Pacos said after the meeting that town officials scheduled a special meeting to approve the contract so the contractor could get moving on the work, with no further delays. He said he hopes the work can be done by next summer. The project has been years in the making and is associated with the creation of a water district for the Lily Dale community.

Lily Dale currently buys water from the village of Cassadaga. Pacos said the town of Pomfret will now be buying the Cassadaga water and selling it back to Lily Dale residents under the new water district.

The project involves placement of new water mains and meters to revamp the community’s antiquated water infrastructure, which is as much as 100 years old. Pacos said Lily Dale will be responsible for hookups between mains and customers.

During the meeting, Town Councilman Brett Christy stated that the bids the town received for the project were “way out of whack. They were pretty spread apart.” Town Councilman Christopher Schaefer replied that the bids were about what the project engineer had expected.

“I don’t expect to have any add-ones, any overages, with this lump sum bid,” Christy said. He added that if the engineers attempted to approve any, the town might have to switch engineers.

The Lily Dale Assembly originally submitted a request in 2015 to Pomfret to set up a water district. Congressman Tom Reed announced in June 2019 that a federal loan would fund the upgrades.

Lily Dale was under a boil-water order for more than two months in 2020, from July 14 to Sept. 24, due to contamination in the antiquated water mains. Paul Snyder, an engineer who works with the county Department of Health and Human Services, stated in September 2020, “This was probably the worst contaminated distribution system I’ve seen in nearly 20 years of being the engineer at the health department.”