General contractor Rieth-Riley is still shooting for a June 4 completion day for the Downtown utility project, now in its third and final phase: the actual replacement of the sanitary sewer main between West Indiana Ave. and the Norfolk Southern grade-crossing.

But as Chesterton Town Engineer noted at Monday night’s meeting of the Utility Service Board, there have been some rain days and it’s conceivable that work will go beyond June 4.

Progress to date has “been slow but steady,” O’Dell said. On Tuesday a second crew joined the first at the site, partly to make up for lost time.

In other business, Superintendent Rob Lovell reported that all open positions have been filled, with a start day of May 9.

Lovell also reported that the collections crew is now moving its headquarters from a rented building to the Street Department’s old home at 609 Grant Ave., now that the Street Department has moved into its new digs at the 15th Street facility.

In April Chesterton used 53.26 percent of its 3,710,000 gallon per day (gpd) allotment of the wastewater treatment plant; Porter, 77.81 percent of its 809,000 gpd allotment; the Indian Boundary Conservancy District, 91.74 percent of its 81,000 gpd allotment; and the plant as a whole, 57.24 percent of its capacity.

In an extremely wet month—with 5.59 inches of rain—there were no bypasses in April

And last month the Utility ran a deficit of $196,127 and in the year-to-date is running a deficit of $73,225.

　Posted 5/18/2011