By JAN LARSON McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
When the power goes out, people want answers. Residents don’t like being in the dark.
They want to know what caused the outage, and most importantly, when will the power be back on.
Bowling Green officials are looking into a service where residents can report power outages 24/7. The service would prevent the BG Police Division being swamped with phone calls from people without power, and would provide better communication during outages.
During a meeting of the city’s Board of Public Utilities last month, Municipal Administrator Lori Tretter noted that power outages are rare in Bowling Green.
“We’re very fortunate,” Tretter said. But “when there is an outage, our customers want information.”
Last month, a car crash at Bowling Green Road West and Mitchell Road knocked out power for more than three hours on much of the west side of the city. Outages of that duration are unusual in the city.
“Electricity is available to Bowling Green customers 99.9952% of the time, well above the national average. In the rare occasion that power is lost, Bowling Green customers have their power restored within an average of 25 minutes versus the national average of 108 minutes for a utility our size,” said Jim Odneal, assistant utilities director for Bowling Green.
Also at the meeting, BG Public Infrastructure Director Brian O’Connell reported that bids came in high for the city’s sewer relining work this year.
The published engineer’s estimate was $735,000, and the city could have awarded a contract up to 10% over the estimate, or $808,500, O’Connell said. But the city received three bids for $840,706, $928,892, and $1,389,324.
Because the low bid is over 10% of the estimate, the city could either rebid the project with a new estimate, or seek authorization by ordinance to award the contract to the lowest bidder.
O’Connell said the staff reviewed the bids and recommended awarding the contract to the low bidder, Inliner Solutions, for $840,706. The biggest difference between the engineer’s estimate and the bids came from the unit price for the 33-inch diameter sewer. The largest sewer the city has relined in the past was a 24-inch sewer.
“We also believe this price is reasonable given two contractors bid exactly the same unit price for the 33-inch sewer,” O’Connell said.
The city’s plan is to complete the sewer relining in the Village Subdivision prior to starting the waterline replacement project, if possible. O’Connell anticipates bidding out the waterline project in the next two months.
