From the ground up

MURRAY — When it rains, it pours. And when it rains really hard in Murray, people can be found tubing and canoeing down the city streets.

“When it rains, the town floods, and then the water just sits and it’s destroying our streets,” said Denise Simmons, Murray city administrator, who has been in the position for the past eight months.

However, city officials are in the process of getting various city infrastructure problems fixed. They hired JEO Consulting to help with working on storm water and drainage issue, as well as the water distribution system.

What comes first

Simmons said infrastructure issues have to be addressed first before the problems with the broken streets are dealt with.

“You know, we don’t want to throw $2.4 million at the streets to only tear them up later because we haven’t fixed the infrastructure issues,” she said.

The city is also working on repairs to its sanitary sewer system. Officials are working on installing new water meters throughout town. All of the meters will be off of the cellular system, and if somebody tampers with a meter, it will be known right away.

JEO is in the process of doing an engineering study right now for the water system and the storm sewer system. The goal is to get the water system study done by the end of September to take advantage of USDA funding still available this year.

There will also be opportunities to look into acquiring funding for next year, as well.

PPG grants

To aid Murray’s progress, the city has been awarded not only one, but two, pre-planning grants (PPG) through the USDA to start their work.

“That kind of pushes us ahead. We have to get these studies done to go after the larger money to really get these kicked off and get them going,” Simmons said.

With Murray’s water distribution system, the city doesn’t have a closed-loop system. Officials are looking into making it a closed-loop system, as well as making sure there’s enough water pressure to fulfill fire hydrant requirements. Right now, there is low pressure in several areas.

“The main goal for all of this though is to make sure we cross all our ‘T’s’ and dot all our ‘I’s’ so that we get the funding that’s available for these different projects,” said Perry Gjersvik, senior project manager with JEO Consulting.

Simmons said there are grants available for infrastructure issues, but they’re not 100 percent funding grants. There’s going to be some kind of “matching” stipulation.

Future

However, good infrastructure can only help benefit the city of Murray.

“We would like to see the community grow,” Simmons said. “We would like to get more businesses in town. We want to get more people in town. We have an amazing school system and we want to make the town and the school system complement each other.”

If all goes according to plan with the infrastructure progress, construction could begin sometime in 2016.

“I’ve worked with a lot of communities on these types of issues,” Gjersvik said. “Most communities feel like they can’t afford these kind of things, so they don’t even embark on these type of projects. I really commend the city of Murray for taking on the infrastructure problems and being progressive and proactive meeting the needs of the community.”