The Constantine Village Council is moving forward on several fronts to tackle problems with groundwater infiltration of the community’s sanitary sewer collection system.

The council took three actions during its meeting Monday evening (November 16th) in response to recommendations from the Sewer Ad Hoc Committee chaired by Trustee Gary Mathers.

In his update to the council, Mathers reported the committee met twice last week and said, “We feel we need to be more aggressive in attacking the infiltration problem.”

Groundwater infiltration is thought to be the cause of higher-than-expected sewer flows from Constantine to the wastewater treatment plant in Three Rivers.

In the first action, the council authorized Village Manager Mark Honeysett to contract with ProForm Pipe Lining of Mishawaka, Indiana to install cured-in-place lining in a 350-foot section of 8-inch sewer line in the Garden Street neighborhood at a cost of $15,225.

The second action was to authorize Honeysett to work with Fleis and VanDenBrink Engineering to develop a request for proposals for the purchase of two flow meters to be used to measure and compare sewer flows over a period of time.  Mathers said, “We thought that it would be important to start it now to get a baseline value for as many of the streets in town as we could and then when the spring thaw comes and wet weather comes next year, we’ll have a good way to compare what is coming into the system versus the normal flow.  Two meters were recommended by our engineers in order to get a comparison between different sections of the town during the same event like a rainstorm.”

Mathers said the meters are moveable and have an estimated price tag of $10,000 each.

Regarding the potential purchase of the flow meters, Mathers said, “It’s a good investment we feel, right now, for us to recoup some of the money that the auditor was talking about earlier tonight,” a reference to the audit report presented earlier in the evening.  Mathers said, “If we can identify and correct some of the problem sewer lines, we’ll be money ahead.”

In the third action, the council authorized the village manager to have Clean Earth Environmental Contracting Services to perform camera work on 175 feet of sewer line in the 100 block of East Water Street at a cost not to exceed $250.  The area was described by Mathers as “a prime candidate for cured-in-place lining.”

In a related matter, Honeysett reported that ProForm Pipe Lining is scheduling the cured-in-place lining work on West Water Street authorized by the council during its November 2nd meeting.  Honeysett indicated it appears the work – on 651 feet of sewer line at a cost of just over $28,000 – will happen “after Thanksgiving – perhaps as late as the first or second week in December.”