Partnership brings over-budget lake cost back down

After dredging plans went awry in the McKinley Lake restoration project, the city of Creston is working to find more funding sources and move project finances around in order to complete the dredging without more city dollars.

“During these projects, it’s not uncommon for things to happen,” Iowa DNR Fisheries Biologist Andy Jansen said. “The contractor got into a creek channel and had to overdredge some areas in order to access other parts of the lake to do some dredging according to the plan set that they were given to work off of.”

JNC Construction has been working to empty the lake bed of sediment and waste since December. With the instructions to dig until they hit clay, JNC kept digging, eventually reaching depths up to 15 feet with still no clay. The original plans had 250,000 cubic yards of sediment to be removed from the lake, with an average depth of about 7 feet. So far, 155,000 cubic yards of the planned removal has occurred, alongside an extra 65,000 cubic yards of overdredged sediment.

In order to get the remaining sediment out, an extra $366,000 is needed. This comes after JNC agreed to waive 15,000 cubic yards, amounting to about $100,000, from the total.

“The contractor is just saying, ‘you know what, we didn’t see this coming up either, we’re going to help you out a little bit,’ which is fantastic,” Jansen said.

It was explained that without a depth of at least 4 or 5 feet, heavy vegetation will grow back. While some vegetation is needed to keep the water clean, the goal is to keep the lake as weed-free as possible while keeping a healthy habitat for fish.

There were a couple options decided on to save money. Two come from the generosity of local organizations.

“You guys have maybe one of the best local sports groups around in Union County, which is the High Lakes Outdoor Alliance. We had $24,000 of fish habitat that I wanted to put in the lake to make the fishing good once the lake’s refilled,” Jansen said. “They decided that they would put up $20,000 towards that fish habitat.”

The Green Valley State Park staff also offered to paint the ADA signage free of charge, saving the project about $2,500.

Another way to save money on the project was to take one of the four planned jetties out of the equation. This will save an extra $80,000 to be used for dredging.

The Creston Parks and Recreation board originally had $100,000 set aside to finish any extra projects after the lake dredging was complete. However, they agreed to put this money toward the dredging. With $100,000 of new money coming into the project, the Iowa DNR has agreed to match this, bringing the total to $200,000 of new money coming in.

For the remaining balance to complete the dredging, Creston City Administrator Mike Taylor said some of the money meant for redoing the road around the lake could be used since the roads are less beat up from construction vehicles than the city expected.

“I did talk with TJ this afternoon about the road. There was a line item on the road for milling, and so the recommendation I believe that he received is that the milling just shouldn’t be done, we can just asphalt on top of that,” Taylor said. Milling alone would add about $42,000 to the dredging budget, though more could be taken out of the roadwork plans.

All this together should cover the extra money needed to complete the dredging, though any change orders will need to go through the city council first. The council will discuss this at their next meeting, scheduled for 6 p.m. Nov. 4.