The City Council of Webster City will take up an agenda of just two items at its first regularly-scheduled meeting of December this evening.

The meeting begins in council chambers of City Hall, 400 Second Street, Webster City, at 6 p.m.

The Council, at its October 20 meeting, authorized consultant Snyder & Associates to issue a notice of intent to hire a Construction Manager at Risk (CMAR) to manage final design and construction of improvements to the city’s aging waste water treatment plant on east Ohio Street.

In a memorandum to the Council, Darin Jacobs, P.E., Snyder & Associates, who’s heading up redesign and rebuilding of both the waste water and water treatment plant projects, advised eight firms had shown interest in the role of CMAR for the wastewater plant project.

After reviewing qualifications and experience of the eight firms, Snyder recommended request for proposal documents — RFPs — be sent to the four top-scoring firms: Woodruff Construction, Ames; Story Construction, Ames; Tricon Construction Group, Dubuque; and Wendler, Inc., South Amana.

In Iowa, the usual method employed to manage large projects, such as the redesign and rebuilding of Webster City’s wastewater treatment plant, is the traditional design-bid-build

method in which the city hires a consultant to design the project, then, after competitive bidding, hires a contractor to complete the project to the specified design. While this system has worked well, it has been blamed for cost overruns in recent years.

These unforeseen and often unforeseeable cost increases, exemplified by change orders, were amplified by disruptions to supply channels, materials cost increases and inflation after the Covid pandemic.

If one of the four firms is eventually hired as CMAR for the wastewater plant project, it will set a precedent in Webster City. A key objective for using a CMAR is a “guaranteed maximum price” the city would pay for the finished plant.

City Manager John Harrenstein has set a $30 million cap on cost for the project, which has been in the planning for about 18 months; it’s likely the CMAR chosen would participate in final design of the plant before certifying a guaranteed maximum price in its contract with the city.

This is a significant reduction in cost to ratepayers compared to the proposed nearly $80 million new waste water treatment plant that had been discussed during a previous city administration.

The second matter on tonight’s agenda concerns interest expressed by Angela and John Harrenstein in purchasing parcel “A” of Lot No. 1 in the Wall Creek Addition of Webster City, which is city-owned property. The proposal before the Council is to make the purchase the subject of a public hearing at the Council’s regularly-scheduled meeting on December 15.