City Approves Bid on Davidson Lake Dredging

The city of Toccoa will move forward with using a northeast Georgia company to dredge Davidson Lake.

Monday, city commissioners unanimously approved a bid from a company called River Sand, Inc. of Cleveland, Georgia for the dredging project in the amount of just over $1.014 million.

River Sand’s bid was the lowest of four bids received for the project.

Toccoa City Manager Billy Morse said that bid came in well below what the city was expecting to spend on the project.

“It was less than half of our project estimate,” said Morse of the bid. “That is a savings of $1.1 million to us.”

Morse said saving that much money over what was estimated is not only great news, but very significant in the city’s planning to pay for the work.

“If the bids had come in at the $2 million estimated project cost, we would have had to borrow the money to complete the project,” said Morse. “Now, we are able to use funds the city has already been setting aside for projects like this.”

He said not borrowing would save the city about $60,000 in loan fees.

Morse said that the city will use a number of in-house sources to provide the money for this project and would cover any shortfall from the Commission Reserve Account.

Morse said any money used from the Commission Reserve Account to cover costs on this project would be re-paid to the CRA during Fiscal Year 2016.

City commissioners also unanimously approved Morse’s funding proposal and voted to create a separate account in order to track and keep separate monies used for this project.

Davidson Lake is one of Toccoa’s three sources of water for its water system.

Morse said the project needs to be done because the reservoir is filling up with silt and needs to be dredged to gain capacity in the reservoir and remove pressure on the reservoir’s dam.

He said the company should mobilize and get started in the next couple of months on the project.