Public works details three repairs, proposes two hires to reduce contracting costs

The city’s Parks and Public Works staff described how they handled three concurrent infrastructure repairs and outlined a plan to shift more work in-house to reduce contracting costs. The presentation, delivered to the Parks and Public Works Committee, covered a broken 4-inch irrigation mainline valve, an illicit connection between a sewer line and a stormwater catch basin, and extensive damage to irrigation control wiring caused by a tree.

The details matter because the repairs affected public infrastructure in the Town Center area and highlighted aging systems and staffing limits. Phil, the city’s deputy director and operations manager, told the committee the team completed two of the three repairs the same week they were discovered and that bringing more work in-house could save money going forward.

Phil said the Douglas Avenue repair involved a 4-inch mainline valve about 7 feet below grade. Staff used a Vactor truck and hydro excavation for a safe trench and shored the excavation; Austin Hilton, a city water staffer, and help from North Bend provided parts and assistance. Phil said the valve assembly was exposed and repaired and the crew completed that work in about four and a half hours; concrete to restore sidewalks remains to be poured.

The second repair began after stormwater inspectors found a sewer line plumbed into a catch basin at Falls and King Street behind City Hall. Phil said staff used the same Vactor truck and rerouted the sewer line to the sanitary system the same day. He said the plumbing error dated to the Town Center Phase 1 construction and described it as “a mistake that was done by the city 15 years ago.” The sanitary connection was isolated and repaired; sidewalk restoration is also pending there.

On the third issue, Phil showed a photograph of a bundle of irrigation station and communication wires disrupted by a tree planted over buried infrastructure in Community Park. The city used pneumatic (air) excavation and hand work to preserve or attempt to trace wiring; the tree was subsequently removed. Phil estimated recovery and rewiring would take about a week.

The presentation also covered inspection and asset-management practices. Phil said the city has roughly 4,000 catch basins and inspects half of them each year, meeting permit obligations. “We inspect every catch basin in the city on a 2 year basis,” he said. During the current cycle staff found about 200 catch basins that were missing from the city’s GIS inventory and added them to the system.

On staffing and contracting, public works leaders argued that adding two parks employees would allow the city to perform more concrete work and routine maintenance in-house and reduce reliance on contractors. Phil said the city currently pays about $226,000 a year under a contract with a company called AtWork to maintain mini parks; he said a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows two additional employees could reduce that spending and provide more in-house capacity for tasks such as gutter work and painting. “We managed to pull this off,” Phil told the committee of the recent repairs, and he added a broader management point: “If you spend the money now to maintain it, you end up spending less in the long run.”

Staff said they are working with the finance group to produce a cost comparison showing recent contractor spending versus the projected in-house cost if the additional staff were hired; they noted the finance director (referred to as Mike in discussion) would need to review that analysis before personnel changes proceed. The committee pressed for timing on savings; staff said the work-order system and Tyler asset-management tools will provide better cost tracking and, after collecting a few years of data, could support predictive maintenance.

No formal votes or ordinance actions were taken during the presentation. Committee members asked follow-up questions about the Town Center Phase 1 contractor history, whether other catch basins in the same project were inspected (staff said the related catch basins were inspected and similar issues were not found), and the timeline for the irrigation rewiring work (about one week). Phil and other staff offered to return with more data and a formal staffing/cost proposal to the finance team.

For now, the immediate repairs are complete or nearly complete: the buried valve and the illicit sewer connection were repaired, and irrigation wiring repairs are underway with sidewalk concrete restoration to follow where needed.