Monmouth City Council has approved the selection of the engineering firm of Woodard and Curran for the water main construction project before moving forward with the downtown square revitalization, says City Administrator Lew Steinbrecher:
“About a year and a half ago, Congress passed, and the President signed the American Rescue Plan Act. Within that legislation, there were funds allocated states and local governments. The City of Monmouth was allocated $1.2 million. The City Council decided to use those funds to replace the water main, which obviously was necessary before we can do the street scape beautification. Since it is federal money, we had to go through a formal review and selection process. Based on my review of the evaluation criteria, I recommended to the Council the firm of Woodard and Curran for the water main project. The primary reasons for that, based on our evaluation criteria, was their understanding of the city’s water system needs.”
Preliminary aspects of the project include cleaning and videoing of the downtown sewers, leading into the beautification process, where design work is currently ongoing and bids will be out this winter, and construction anticipated beginning in the spring. Mayor Rod Davies informs the revitalization will address many of the parking concerns:
“The design has a little bit more parking in the quadrants and we are trying to hold onto the parking on North and South Main Street as they transition from two lanes to one lane. As part of this, we have been trying to study some diagonal parking further down on South Main and in the 200 Block on South.”
The City of Monmouth has received a total of $3 million in grant funds for the Downtown revitalization project.
