LEWISTON – The firm that excavated for the local Wal-Mart distribution center is in good shape to win a downtown storm-water project.

Old Town’s Sargent Corp. was the apparent low bidder for the city’s downtown cistern project, saying it would do the work for $4.37 million. City officials opened the bids Thursday afternoon.

The city’s Finance Committee will meet Monday to review all of the bids and award the winner.

The cistern project is one of the biggest projects scheduled for the summer, said Public Services Director Dave Jones.

“It’s a full 540-day project,” Jones said. “They’re going to need all of that time to get it finished.”

The work includes installing a series of five 350-foot concrete culverts underground near the corner of Lincoln and Water streets, between Lincoln Street and the Androscoggin River.

Storm runoff from downtown storm drains would flow into the tanks during heavy storms. The water would be pumped back through the treatment plant once the storm had passed and the runoff had subsided.

It’s designed to keep storm runoff from overwhelming the city’s sanitary sewer system, part of a 15-year program to meet federal water quality standards. So far, work has involved digging up streets to build a duplicate drainage system for rain and snow runoff.

Lewiston has spent $12.1 million since 1997 on sewer overflow projects, installing about 58,000 feet of sewer drains. The cistern project replaces a plan to dig up most downtown streets over the next several years to build a parallel drain system. That would have cost about $21 million.

Sargent did all of the excavation work at Wal-Mart’s Lewiston site, moving more than a million cubic yards of dirt in seven weeks, Jones said.

He expects contractors to begin working on the cistern site in the next month or so, pounding steel sheets into the ground around the dig site to help stabilize the project. They won’t begin digging until later in the fall.