Amanda Forrester / news@whmi.com

Milford’s village council on Tuesday approved a contract amendment for necessary work being done on the water system, increasing the original price by nearly $10,000.

Mackenzie Chamberlain, a project manager in the water resources group for OHM Advisors, presented the council with the new proposed contract, explaining that extra work needed to be done to complete several analyses on the water system. It was discovered during the process that the information they were using was incorrect.

“On our first pass of the analyses, we had some system operation assumptions that we had in the model that we realized were not accurately reflecting what was actually in the system,” Chamberlain said. “We had to have some additional conversations and went through some additional field investigations to confirm some pump station operations as well as the settings on the pressure sustaining valves throughout the system.”

The company requested a contract amendment to increase the contract amount. They said it wouldn’t exceed $9,000. The previous contract amount was $33,500, with the new amount requested at $42,500.

OHM was authorized by the village to complete the work last year. The tasks included updating the hydraulic water model, performing analyses of the water age throughout the system and looking at pressure redistricting in certain pockets of the village, according to Chamberlain.

“We did exceed our expected level of effort for several of those tasks,” Chamberlain said.

The group still has one task to complete, “SCADA Integration of the North and South Pump Station VFDs,” according to the packet included in the agenda for the meeting.

The extra cost was due to “incorrect assumptions on pump station operations,” the OHM information said. The analyses had to be run again with the correct information.

OHM was completing analyses assuming that the two pumps were able to operate at the same time automatically, which turned out to be incorrect. Only one pump works at a time and it is a manual system. It was also discovered that the two fire pumps didn’t work, the statement from OHM said.

The VFDs will allow the pumps to operate automatically and at the same time to help meet needs for the village.

The company offered a breakdown of both the expected and the actual costs.

Water system redistricting in priority areas cost $8,500, over $1,000 more than the original cost projection of $7,100. The price for water age modeling cost $10,900, a big increase from the projected cost of $3,400. The water age analysis of standpipes was almost double the projected cost, coming in at $7,200 instead of $3,700, according to the breakdown.

There was no timeline given on when the last portion of the work would be completed during Tuesday’s meeting.