Pinellas County adds to two infrastructure improvement funds

A pair of improvement projects of Pinellas County’s Department of Engineering and Technical Support — one for the Pinellas Trail and the other for stormwater pipe fixes — just got a nice financial boost.

County commissioners, at their first regular meeting of September, approved a change order to a contract with Layne Inliner, LLC for stormwater pipeline repairs throughout unincorporated Pinellas. The adjustment adds an extra $468,000 to the county’s approved expenditure amount for the project, which now rings in at over $1.8 million.

The newly allotted funds will pay for the project’s “regularly scheduled work,” as $468,000 had previously been taken from this funding channel and put toward improving the county’s South Cross Bayou Wastewater Treatment Plant, a water reclamation facility in St. Petersburg designed to treat an average of 33 million gallons of water per day, according to the county.

The plant needed renovations to some deteriorating storm pipes in order to be brought up to par with the Southwest Florida Water Management District’s permitting and maintenance compliance requirements. All storm pipes within the wastewater treatment plant, after being rehabilitated, now have an expected future life of 30 years.

The nearly half-a-million-dollar side project, as the county contends, was within the scope of the initial stormwater pipeline repair agreement. It just wasn’t anticipated at the time of the bid award.

Funding for unincorporated Pinellas’ stormwater pipeline repairs comes from the county’s infrastructure sales tax, better known as Penny for Pinellas.

Another nearly half-a-million-dollar change order, also approved by the County Commission this month, was added to a contract with Suncoast Development of Pinellas County, and QRC Inc. — two large-scale construction companies — for the timely completion of the Pinellas Trail shouldering project.