There’s a bull’s-eye in the etched-out hillside north of downtown Akron.
Below it, more than 200 trucks have plopped about 2,000 cubic yards of concrete, forming a 5-foot-thick launchpad for a drill that will begin a 6,240-foot journey in July beneath city streets, buildings, the Ohio & Erie Canal and the football field at St. Vincent-St. Mary.
“It’s a small tunnel,” said Brad Swinehart, project safety manager for Kenny-Obayashi, the joint venture overseeing construction. “We’re actually bidding a project in Washington, D.C. It’s 7.5 miles long and will take six years.
“But any tunnel has its trials and tribulations. It’s construction,” Swinehart said, standing over a gaping 48-foot-wide hole from which the drill will be lifted 173 feet up and out of the earth at the end of its journey around Christmas.
Swinehart makes the project sound like a walk in the park. But with holes the size of parks and an unprecedented bill, the scope of Akron’s combined sewer and water project — and its impact on future generations that will pay for and unwittingly use it — cannot be underestimated.
Generational debt
The project, detailed online at akronwaterwaysrenewed.com, is massive.
After a court-ordered completion date of 2028, engineers say, not a drop of the annual 742 million gallons of wastewater-rain mix will taint the Little Cuyahoga River. That’s like diverting enough effluent to nearly fill the Dallas Cowboys stadium to the brim.
The overall strategy is a mix of green projects — porous asphalt, wetlands and other innovations to make Akron a natural sponge — and “gray projects” — those concrete-colored pipes that collect, retain and separate sewage and runoff during and between heavy rainfalls.
Some projects, including green alternatives, have gone slightly over budget. But on balance, the city stands by its expectation of $300 million in savings, reducing the overall price tag for Akron taxpayers and water customers from $1.4 billion to $1.14 billion.
Residents are paying in increased utility bills. The median monthly bill today is $61.31 — $14.92 for water and $46.39 for sewer. This is after the council, including half who still serve, approved a 70 percent increase back in 2014. The administration quietly added $3 in annual fees to each bill this year. Mayor Dan Horrigan’s team since has promised not to touch sewer or water rates (including fees) until 2020.
The city reports it is hitting its 50 percent local hiring goal for the project.
As finance directors and engineers look to make “an unaffordable plan more affordable” through better loans, intergovernmental negotiations and planning, the idea is to stretch out the cost of the project as long as possible.
“It’s a good argument to have,” said Jeff Fusco, chair of City Council’s planning committee. “Do we pass it on to our grandchildren or not? And again, there are residents out there struggling, today.”
Engineering savings
The $184.1 million tunnel project alone accounts for a fifth of the overall expected savings because it came in under the city’s cost estimate.
At a sluggish pace of a few millimeters a minute, the drill will cut a 27-foot circle with 1 million pounds of force guided by GPS coordinates fed into an onboard control room by fiber optics. “It’s just like running a space shuttle,” Swinehart explained. “You got a bubble and a circle. And you just keep the bubble in the circle.”
Workers in million-dollar machines are jackhammering down through soft shale and clay, forgoing the use of gelatinous explosives that — in small doses the size of salami sausages — are blasting shorter tunnels that will tie the new tunnel to old sewers.
On the engineering side, a tunnel leading north from the Merriman Valley to the city’s Water Reclamation Facility looks more like a landscaping job than a pipe project. The visible concrete tube appears untouched. Mounds of dirt on either side have been pushed up against it.
But the saplings and fresh soil are doing more than beautifying the doorstep to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Instead of building a second tunnel, city engineers demonstrated in a 300-foot pilot section that the tunnel could be strengthened with more concrete on top and the inward pressure of the dirt.
What this means is a cap instead of another tunnel, and $30 million in savings.
Truce with feds
The Merriman Valley project deviates from the two-tunnel plan agreed upon in court.
After Akron was sued by the Environmental Protection Agency for violating the Clean Water Act in 2011, a federal judge imposed one of the most restrictive consent decrees in the country: finish in under 25 years with zero effluent afterward.
The bar was set high partly because of Akron’s environmental impact upstream from the national park, and a contentious relationship between its leaders and federal officials in the past.
The Merriman project finished a year ahead of schedule and under budget. It’s among a third of the original consent decree projects that have been or may be altered. And it signals a relaxing of the tense relationships.
Getting the EPA and federal courts to approve was “unbelievably smooth,” explained the architects of the change, city engineer James Hewitt and Pat Gsellman, project manager of Akron Waterways Renewed. Akron’s legal team, for example, wasn’t called to court to sell it.
Fostering amicable relationships has been Horrigan’s goal in meetings from Washington, D.C., to Columbus to Chicago with state, federal and regional officials who sign off on cost-saving adjustments.
“It goes back to a resetting of the tone and a re-forming of the relationships,” said James Hardy, Horrigan’s chief of staff. “That’s critical to understanding why we are now making progress — not saying we weren’t before, but now we’re cooking with gas.
“The war with the federal government is over,” Hardy said.
Refinancing
The city is actively pursuing state loans that could reduce overall debt by extending repayment periods to as long as 45 years at near-zero interest rates.
The WRF Step Feed project — a series of upgrades to storage and treatment tanks — is an early example of potential savings. To pay for the project, Akron applied for and received a loan last year through the Ohio EPA’s Water Pollution Control Loan Fund. The $47.5 million loan is for 30 years at 0.45 percent.
Had the project been financed at 2.35 percent, or the rate taken on loans for the downtown tunnel project, the improvements would have cost taxpayers $15.6 million more in the end.
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug .