Nienhueser awarded contract for north side street repair

Bids for the upcoming north side street projects were awarded to Nienhueser Construction at Tuesday night's city council meeting.

This project involves replacing the street, curb, gutter and sidewalk on four blocks of Forrest Street between 15th Ave. and 17th Ave. The work will continue along 17th Ave. from Forrest to Elm, according to Brett Meyer of Baker & Associates, the company engineering the job.

The bid opened on August 29 at which time two companies submitted proposals on the project, including Nienhueser Construction and Reed Construction. Nienhueser's base bid was around $517,000 while Reid's base bid was around $556,000.

"We're recommending that we award the bid for the project to Nienhueser," Meyer said. "I'd also like to see that the city awards an additional alternate for schedule C of an additional 50 square yards of sidewalk replacement. There's quite a bit up there that needs to be replaced."

The additional sidewalk work would raise the total award to around $520,000.

City Manager Gary Person reminded those present that $350,000 worth of funds going toward completion of this project is coming from a community development block grant. The economic development initiative, started in 2007, held a series of town hall meetings, two town-wide surveys and a neighborhood survey to determine which streets to repair.

"Each time they chose that this is what they wanted to do, is kind of get the ball rolling towards some additional public works improvements on the North side," Person said.

Keith Nienhueser of Nienhueser Construction explained that the company would not have time to start the project until spring 2014.

"Our workload is pretty full," Nienhueser said. "We're saying we don't want to start it until March or April, whatever the weather permits."

City staff agreed that a spring start date would be no problem. The city has two years to use the block grant funds, Person added. The city included the additional sidewalk work in the project