TRWD awards $92.9M contract for Integrated Pipeline Project

The Integrated Pipeline Project overview. 

For more on the project: fwbusinesspress.com/fwbp/article.aspx

Jack Z. Smith Special Projects Reporter Fort Worth Business Press

The Tarrant Regional Water District board voted unanimously Tuesday to pay a Kansas City, Mo.-based firm $92.9 million to construct a 15.5-mile segment of the huge $2.3 billion Integrated Pipeline Project that will significantly boost the volume of water that can be delivered from East Texas lakes to the thirsty, fast-growing Dallas-Fort Worth area.

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The winning bidder among six competing firms was Garney Construction, a 100 percent employee-owned company. Garney’s $92.9 million bid was more than $6 million lower than the second lowest bidder, BAR Constructors, Inc., at $99.2 million.

Altogether, six firms bid to build the so-called 15-1 segment of the 149-mile pipeline, referred to as the “IPL,” shorthand for integrated pipeline.

The 15-1 segment will be constructed in Navarro County (county seat Corsicana), southeast of Tarrant County.

Wesley Cleveland, the water district’s program director for the IPL project, told the board that Garney not only submitted the low bid, but also is “the most-qualified contractor” for the job. The TRWD has worked with Garney Construction in the past and found it to be a “very good contractor” that the water district has “the utmost confidence” in, Cleveland said.

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The price range among the six bids was large, with the highest bid slightly under $130 million. Cleveland said the higher bids might have reflected “nervous money” – bids from national firms that have not previously worked with TRWD and therefore didn’t know what to expect. TRWD, a major supplier of raw water to Tarrant County and North Texas, is partnering with Dallas Water Utilities on the IPL project. Garney will lay huge 108-inch pipe – that’s nine feet in diameter – for the 15-1 segment. The company estimates the work will take 13 months.

The entire IPL will entail construction of 149 miles of new pipeline and related infrastructure from Lake Palestine in East Texas to Benbrook Lake in Tarrant County, with connections to the TRWD’s Richland-Chambers and Cedar Creek reservoirs, the district’s two biggest water sources .

For Fort Worth and much of the western side of the Metroplex, it means the volume of raw water that TRWD can deliver from Richland-Chambers and Cedar Creek will rise by 197 million gallons per day, a 52 percent increase in capacity. More than two-thirds of that capacity gain is expected to be realized by 2020, and the remainder by about 2030.