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City water board to hire job inspector

WEIRTON – The city’s water board will hire an inspector to oversee widening work being done on Pennsylvania Avenue.

At Thursday’s meeting, board members opted to take advantage of the West Virginia Department of Highway’s willingness to pay for an inspector and hire Ohio-based K.E. McCartney and Associates to monitor the upgrades being done.

Utilities Director A.D. “Butch” Mastrantoni said that in the past, they’d tried to keep costs down by doing the inspections in-house, dispatching staff members to the DOH work site to ensure compliance. But the staff members asked to inspect the work had to try and work around their regular duties and by the time a problem was detected, Mastrantoni said the contractor often had done the work in a way that didn’t jive with city regulations. DOH balked at having to pay for work to be redone because inspections hadn’t been done in a timely manner, he said, “(so) we’ve changed our operating philosophy to accept West Virginia Department of Highways’ offer to pay an inspector.”

In submitting his bid, K.E. McCartney Senior Vice President James D. Mawhorr said his firm understands “services are limited to the monitoring and construction for water line and sanitary sewer replacement, as representatives of the city of Weirton, in conjunction with the WVDOT who has overall administration authority for the project.”

“KEM will monitor and document that the materials and construction procedures are in compliance with city requirements,” Mawhorr said. “KEM’s staff has vast experience with the administration and inspection of public improvement projects utilizing federal, state and local funding.”

In other action, Mastrantoni said the semi-annual citywide line flush should be done sometime this afternoon or evening. The board hired AquaTech to do a $6,500 leak survey to help minimize in-system water losses.

Mastrantoni also said crews will take advantage of the city’s street paving program to replace four existing valves on Ferguson Avenue in the north end.

“We look the street paving list over so we’re not doing maintenance that could be done beforehand and then have to chop” the newly paved streets up, he said.

(Harris can be contacted at lharris@heraldstaronline.com)

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