LEWISTON — Bids for a long-planned city storm sewer project around Bates College came in higher than expected, and that will delay work elsewhere.

Public Works Director David Jones told City Councilors Monday that bids for a storm sewer project along Oak Street came in $329,704 over budget.

It’s an important enough project that the city needs to get the work done quickly, Councilor John Butler said.

“It was a problem that came up a couple of years ago, and we just need to pay it,” Butler said. “There was a lot of water in a lot of basements.”

Oak Street is part of the sewer service area that overflowed during heavy rains in 2009, flooding basements along White, Bardwell and Nichols streets.

The area is part of the remaining areas with a combined storm and sanitary sewer. In those areas, storm runoff flows into the sanitary water treatment system and can overflow into basement drains during heavy storms. 

The city has been working to build a separate storm sewer that drains rain and snow runoff from city streets and directs it into area streams.

The current Oak Street project, scheduled for this summer, would build a separate line along Oak Street between Sabattus and Blake streets and on Sabattus Street between Oak and Wood streets.

Work would continue next summer along Oak Street between Sabattus and White streets.

The city had set aside $746,162 for the project, but bids opened March 8 and came in at about $1.08 million.

“It’s just a difficult project,” Jone said. “It’s an older area which means its very deep. It’s in a narrow part of the roadway so it’s just going to be a difficult project for the contractor to do.”

Councilors Tuesday approved pulling the money out of two funds destined to pay for similar work in the Jepson Brook area. That’s a man-made channel of concrete that runs from around Lewiston’s northern downtown, from the Garcelon Bog to the Androscoggin River just north of the Riverside Cemetery.

Jones said the city will push projects scheduled for streets along Jepson Brook back to the 2013-14 fiscal year.

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