County moving forward with Uniontown sewer project

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BROWNSTOWN — The Jackson County Commissioners are taking the steps to construct a sanitary sewer system, including a wastewater treatment plant, in the Uniontown area.

Commissioner Drew Markel said during a meeting Tuesday at the courthouse that HWC Engineering recently gave a favorable recommendation for the project and the plan is to “work on moving forward” with constructing the system.

“There’s still a lot of discussion to happen on what it looks like and where it will actually go, the actual nuts and bolts of what happens,” he said. “It looks like we could have sewer or even access to sewer on both sides of (Interstate 65).”

The sewer system would be near Exit 41 on I-65 in the eastern part of Jackson County.

The commissioners did not vote, however, take any official action Tuesday on the project designed to pave the way for future development in that area.

In a Sept. 6 commissioners meeting, project engineers from Indianapolis-based HWC Engineering said the total cost of the project at that time was $21 million.

That total was split between two phases.

The first phase would cost $11.2 million with $4.5 million of that cost going toward building lift stations.

The remaining $10 million for the second phase would go toward building out pipelines to houses and buildings in the area around the plant.

Through the American Rescue Plan Act, the county received $8.58 million, and based on the interim final rule for ARPA, funding could be used for the sewer project.

More funding for the project could potentially come from the $1.84 million the county received from the Regional Economic Acceleration Development Initiative (READI) grant.

In March, commissioners approved a $25,000 contract with HWC Engineering to conduct a study that would examine the feasibility and costs of constructing a sewer system in the Uniontown area.

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