Bid openings on major municipal projects can be stressful matters.

When costs are projected to stretch past the $10 million mark, even a relatively small deviation percentage wise can mean major costs to a small city like Brazil.

So it was that the Brazil Board of Works was quite happy Wednesday morning when bids for a major upcoming water project came in well below the estimated cost.

The project, which will include a new water main stretching from the well field near Reelsville to the City of Brazil, as well as drilling a new Municipal Well No. 11, has a projected budget of around $13 million, with estimated construction costs in the area of $10.5 million.

So it was good news Wednesday that an option came through that could cost shy of $9 million.

Two different divisions of the project were opened on Wednesday, one for the waterline work and one for the well work.

Three water main bids were submitted, with totals as follows:

• Atlas Excavating, West Lafayette: $8,356,570.

• B&T Drainage, Marshall, Ill.,: $8,988,560.

• Plant Brothers Excavating and Construction, Rosedale: $6,766,492.30.

Five other companies requested plans but did not submit bids.

For the new well, just one bid was submitted:

• Graves Construction Services, Switz City: $1,919,191 with an alternate bid of an additional $515,151.

Mark Sullivan of Midwestern Engineers, which is working with the city on the engineering of the preliminary phases of the project, expressed his surprise at just one bid being submitted.

“We had like six plan holders, so I’m surprised we didn’t see a couple other bids,” Sullivan said.

Still, both Sullivan and the three Board of Works members — Mayor Brian Wyndham, Ruthann Jeffries and Linda Messmer — expressed their satisfaction with the lone well bid, as well as their satisfaction with previous work from Graves.

Wyndham did note that he sometimes worries about change orders on low bids that ultimately drive up the price, though that has not been the experience of the city with either Graves or with Plant Brothers, which submitted the low bid for the main.

Still, none of the bids were actually accepted on Wednesday. Grant administrator Kristy Jerrell of Jerrell Consulting noted that the plans was simply to open the bids and then have Sullivan review them before making a recommendation to the board at its next meeting.

With that in mind, the board voted unanimously to take all bids under advisement.

“I feel like we dodged a bullet. I was really concerned about it,” Wyndham said. “I think we got some very reputable contractors to work on this.”

The work should represent significant improvements to the city water system, including the addition of the new 800-gallon permanent well. Currently, the city’s five wells are constantly in production, along with one redundant well. The new well will ensure the city has the capacity needed for peak demand.

Additionally, the alternation of the wells will be available for routine maintenance, which will ultimately reduce wear and tear on pumps and equipment.

As for the other part of the project, the current water line is an 18-inch cast iron pipe that is about 70 years old.

“It runs about five miles total from Reelsville to the water plant where we’ll be running it to,” Wyndham said during his State of the City address in February. “Our current waterline is about 70 years old and it has just outlived its use. It’s made of cast iron and when that thing goes down, we don’t have a ‘Plan B’. We’d be out of water entirely.”

The new water main will be a 24-inch high-density polyethylene pipe. The current raw water main is facing numerous issues; the old cast iron joints are beginning to fail, leading to breakage and leakage.

Working with Jerrell on the project, the city secured a $750,000 Community Development Block Grant from the Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs, with the remainder coming from the Indiana Finance Authority and State Revolving Funds. These funds will consist of traditional low-interest loans, forgivable loans for disadvantaged community assistance and forgivable loans for addressing emerging contaminants.

While the cost is high, Wyndham is aware that this sort of project doesn’t tend to get cheaper over time.

“The way I see it, it’s not going to get any cheaper to fix it because right now it’s about a $13 million project,” he said back in February. “This is something we’ve been needing to do for a very long time and I priced it out pre-Covid and it was only $7 million then. That just shows you how much everything has increased in price since then. This new plastic line will last there for decades and not just ensure that we’ll have water, but the areas we furnish water for will too.”