Palmer works to expand water system

PALMER — When the snow clears next spring, the city of Palmer hopes to start clearing the way for a 1 million-gallon water tank next to Mat-Su College.

“We would like to see this go out for bids in January or February,” Palmer Public Works Director Tom Cohenour said.

That first bid would be for clearing the site and building a road from where the tank will sit out to Trunk Road. The city has already purchased five acres from the college.

“We’d like that to be done first and then we would put out another bid subsequent to that for the vertical work,” Cohenour said.

Vertical work, Cohenour said, refers to the tank itself, as well as fencing and everything else that isn’t laid out horizontally like site preparation or road construction. The tank is being designed, and the city has already picked out a mural to paint on it once it’s done.

The city started expanding its water system north from where it ends at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center at around the same time the state began expanding Trunk Road.

Cohenour said that, eventually, the city hopes residents in the area will choose to join the city’s water system, but the project isn’t so much for that as it is for making a more robust water system.

“It helps create a certain amount of redundancy in the system, Cohenour said, adding that if water pressure in the city was disrupted due to an earthquake or “any number of reasons, we will still be able to route water from a different place toward Palmer.”

According to a presentation Cohenour gave to the city council in February on the water system projects, the city anticipates that by 2030 it will need 6 million gallons of water in reservoirs like the new tank. Currently, it needs at least 1.6 million just to keep the system running and has 1.78 million. The new tank will bump the system up to 2.78 million gallons.

Phase I of the project, which included running pipes up to the hospital and came online in 2006, cost $13 million in mostly state and federal grants.

This phase, Phase II, was broken up into two parts: Phase IIb, which was done first and meant bringing the lines up Trunk Road, and Phase IIa, which includes the reservoir tank.

According to Cohenour’s presentation, so far the city has collected $5.9 million with $2.4 million in federal grants, $1.75 million from the state and $1.7 million from the city put up as matching funds for Phases IIa and IIb. The city expects that funding number to climb to $9.5 million with state money and city matching funds this year. The city will need to get around $900,000 more to put the project over the top.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.