La Marque council votes to bid SBR wastewater treatment plant to meet grant deadline

La Marque City Council voted Thursday to put a sequencing batch reactor (SBR) wastewater treatment plant out for bid after engineers told the council the alternative would better meet a fixed grant budget and the project closeout deadline. Councilman James Ross made the motion and the council approved it by voice vote.

Council members took the action after a presentation from engineering and grant-administration staff explaining that construction prices have risen since the city’s original 2021 GLO application and that the GLO construction line in the grant is effectively capped. Rick Garcia, a project engineer working on the plans, said the conventional design’s construction cost was estimated at about $40.4 million and that an SBR option could lower the footprint and cost to roughly $35.4 million.

The decision matters because the project’s federal disaster-recovery funds from the Texas General Land Office (GLO) are subject to an administrative closeout date tied to the GLO agreement. Alex Siegfried, the city’s project manager with the grant administrator, told the council the project was granted a two-year…