The Fremont City Council approved a resolution on Tuesday night to affirm the city administrator’s emergency declaration for repairs from a June 24 storm.
Repair work for the transmission system is estimated at $1.75 million. Fremont City Administrator Brian Newton told the council that there was an urgency to get the work completed.
“So initially when we suffered the damage from the wind storm, little did I know that it was going to cost us as much as what is estimated. Nor did I know it was going to take so long to get improvements made,” he said. “We quickly came to the realization that — because of the dollar amount — if we go through the formal process of identifying, hiring an engineer to write the specs, going out for bids and then accepting the bids in a public offering, we would delay the repairs by another 10 weeks. That is not acceptable.
“We don’t want to wait that long. We’ve already lost the summer because of material delays, but a 10-week delay pushes us into the fall ice storm season.”
Newton made the declaration the day of the storm. Fremont Municipal Code requires that any such emergency declaration be affirmed by the city council at its next meeting.
The city administrator explained the repair process on north Luther Road and the Highway 30 crossing.
“We’re going to build it with steel poles. We’re going to do the same thing we’ve done,” he said. “If you’ve noticed, we’ve done the same thing on the north side of the Tech Park and we’ve done the same thing on County Road S. It just seems like every couple of years wind just beats us up in this north area. We do the same repairs, we order steel poles and get the T2 conductor that seems to be handling the wind a little bit better. Let’s move this along because we don’t need a delay.”
Councilman Brad Yerger praised the utility employees for their work the night of the storm.
“We’ve had a couple of outages, at least in my area of the city, and they have been restored post haste by the city workers,” he said. “So I just wanted to (give a) shout out to the city workers because they’ve been doing a commendable job under difficult circumstances. … They should be commended for it.”
The council approved the amended resolution 8-0.
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