By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Hutchinson City Councilman Jon Daveline wants to know when those that are paying stormwater fees can expect to see movement on the Cow Creek drainage project. The short answer is that most of the work still needs to be done with the railroads involved, because that's really where the bottleneck is regarding the water itself.
"Some are of the opinion that they want to construct their own bridge," said City Manager Jeff Cantrell. "When the time comes, we pay their bill. There's others that are a little more open to the concept of us allowing it to work into our project, so long as we follow their design criteria. None of them have said yet, we're not going to give you a price tag for what that is. We're trying to figure that price tag out, I think, is what I have heard and what our design criteria is going to be based on the service levels that are anticipated for that future rail potential need."
This involves bridges on the UP, BNSF and K and O lines as well as a local spur.
"I'd like to think that if we give people sufficient time, they'd sharpen their pencils and they come up with a better price for us and they have something that's a little more potentially affordable for us," Cantrell said. "Whereas, if we put a high degree of pressure on them and they have to deliver an estimate to us promptly or overnight, I know what I would do. As a business owner, I'd probably inflate it 20 or 30 percent just to get my coverage and I'd tell you that's what my probable estimate is. I don't know if that's factual, but I know the rest of the world works that way."
The consultants from Wood Engineering said that the most important section of the creek in terms of getting bang for the public's buck is south of Avenue G to K-61, but that the bottleneck in the project overall is those railroad bridges.