East Bay and Acme townships are targeting a May construction start on an $11 million sewer project – building a new main to replace a crucial but severely corroded line that carries all the wastewater for both townships to the treatment plant in Traverse City. Trustees for both townships met Thursday to review the latest project details, including the planned pipe route, the construction timeline – estimated to stretch over 2025 and 2026 – and plans to bond approximately $6 million to cover the project’s funding gap.

East Bay and Acme operate independent sanitary sewer collection systems but “rely jointly on a force main to convey wastewater to the wastewater treatment plant located in Traverse City,” according to Wade Trim, East Bay’s engineering firm. The 2.7-mile ductile iron pipe travels from East Bay’s pump station #1 (pictured, map) near the intersection of Indian Trail Boulevard and Pine Grove Avenue south to the TART Trail, then goes west along the TART Trail paralleling Parsons Road to the treatment plant on the north side of Boardman Lake. Installed in 1974, the 50-year-old pipe is nearing the end of its design life, recently suffered a break, and faces the risk of continued forced shutdowns “as the pipe ages and corrosion worsens,” Wade Trim previously stated.

East Bay and Acme are partnering to build a new sewer line parallel to the existing line, which will remain in operation while the new pipe is being built. Once the new pipe is ready, the old pipe can be shut off, cleaned, and eventually rehabilitated – serving as a backup to the new pipe. “Once completed, the ability to divert wastewater flow from one force main to another will accommodate future periodic inspections and repairs,” according to East Bay Township’s website. “The project will add the needed resiliency and redundancy to this critical infrastructure for decades.”

Construction on the new pipe is estimated at $11 million. Grand Traverse County awarded East Bay Township $2 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds for the project, funds that must be spent by the end of 2026. The new line has also received $1 million in Congressional Community Project funds, and both townships have committed $1 million each – bringing funds raised to date to $5 million. While still hopeful for additional state funding, East Bay and Acme for now intend to bond the remaining $6 million. Bond attorneys Thursday advised that the townships can decide in the coming months the exact amount they want to bond once they receive construction bids and calculate bonding costs. The townships can also decide how long of a repayment period they want, likely ranging from 20 to 30 years.

Joe Slonecki of Wade Trim said preliminary engineering work has been completed on the new line, with final engineering now underway. Engineers have divided the project into two segments, each with a different recommended construction method. The first segment runs from pump station #1 to Garfield Avenue – a “fairly open” route that runs along the TART trail and has few utility conflicts, Slonecki said. That section is a “very good candidate for a directional drill, which is trenchless construction, and it has the least disturbance to the above-ground utilities,” Slonecki explained.

The second segment, however, is more complicated. That section runs through the city from Garfield Avenue to the treatment plant and is “pretty congested,” with several utilities and other force mains in the area, Slonecki said. Accordingly, open cut construction is recommended for that route to trench in the pipe. The best approach will be “utilizing two different contractors who specialize in those (types of) constructions,” Slonecki said of the two segments.

Engineers considered several routes for the second segment, since following the existing route seemed too risky given the dense surrounding development and concerns that construction vibrations could cause a break in the existing weak line. The team ultimately settled on a route that runs along an alleyway north of Hannah Avenue, which has few utility or other conflicts. “That one actually came out to be the cheapest alternative, so that’s kind of a win-win,” Slonecki said. “It’s the most favorable route, and it became the least expensive.”

In addition to finalizing engineering, next steps will include hydraulic modeling – to gauge current and future wastewater flows based on projected growth – which will allow engineers to select the correct force main size. Slonecki said the engineering team anticipated upsizing from a 14-inch to an 18-inch pipe for cost estimate purposes, though the final size required could be smaller than that. The project team is working to finalize local and state permits with the goal of putting the project out to bid in March, allowing construction to start in May.

Slonecki said the team anticipates needing “two construction seasons for a project of this size,” with work likely to continue through the end of 2025 (stopping whenever winter sets in) and then restarting in 2026 with an anticipated November completion that year. Depending on the response from contractors to the bid packages, it’s possible work could happen on both segments concurrently – and could even be done in one season. However, township officials wanted to be pragmatic in anticipating a linear progression between segments and two-year construction timeline. “This project is pretty significant and pretty hefty,” said East Bay Township Supervisor Beth Friend.

Officials still have other project details they’ll need to finalize in the coming months. Those include exactly how the financing split will work between Acme and East Bay, which will be calculated under an existing agreement between the townships based on their system usage. The project team is also considering whether to lay down a second, redundant pipe in the segment two route – creating a backup while the trench is still open – or focus solely on repairing the existing main afterward to serve as the primary backup. The existing pipe would likely be fixed through a cured-in-place-pipe lining, which engineers said could extend its lifespan by decades.

Despite its hefty price tag, the new sewer main is expected to serve Acme and East Bay townships into the next century, with Brian Sousa of Wade Trim estimating a 75-100-year lifespan on the new line. “I think you’ll need a new pipe because you grew so much, sooner than you would need a new pipe because it went bad,” he said.