News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Livingston’s CDBG pipe replacement project project has a bid winner.
The winning bid came in at roughly $643,000. Water Engineer Greg Davenport said this project will address two water concerns in downtown Livingston’s undersized water system.
“7th street, Goodpasture Street, Church Street and several other streets in the downtown area,” Davenport said. “There’s two reasons. Number one is to reduce leakage, number two is equally as important is to provide increased fire flow.”
Davenport said the city will need to contribute an additional $56,000 to fully fund the project. Mayor Curtis Hayes said the city has the money to make the additional contribution, along with the city’s match on the CDBG grant.
Davenport said he recommended the bid because it would save the city money elsewhere.
“Because one of the lines is right there on Church Street and it’s a full overlay of the paving on that street,” Davenport said. “Which is $75,000 of that cost, so that’s paving that you will not have to use out of your annual paving budget.”
Livingston also authorized Davenport to proceed on the process of creating specs and bidding out 1,850 residential water meters with an acoustic listening device. The plan will also break the rural parts of Livingston into 15 zones for metering leaks.
“If it has this constant sound that it’s hearing all day long, there’s probably a water system leak somewhere,” Davenport said. “So what it does, is it downloads this into a data recorder that a Livingston employee driving around in a truck, they don’t look at a meter anymore it just zips the data into the handheld and it develops green, yellow and red dots in your water system. That does only really one thing for you, it narrows down where the guys need to go look.”
Davenport said this work could cost an estimated $1.1 million. However, Mayor Curtis Hayes said that Livingston is losing one million gallons of water a day, and it has to stop.
