Title
Oak Lawn Water System Service Agreement Extension
History
In May 2009, the Village of Oak Lawn released its Water System Master Plan to twelve (12) municipal customers on their system. The Master Plan identified multiple upgrades, expansion and enhancement to the system intended to meet both existing and long term water supply/service needs. As you know, over the last eighteen (18) months, Orland Park has been working with Oak Forest, Tinley Park, Mokena and New Lenox to collectively negotiate issues relative to the cost of the improvement upgrades, as well as operational components of our relationship with Oak Lawn.
A summary of the current issues the group is working through is outlined below:
1. Construction of a redundant line in a separate right-of-way from Central Avenue that will increase capacity and better protect our citizens in the event of a water main break or outage on the existing single service line;
2. Improved capacity to better handle big usage periods that exist during summer months; and
3. Conceptual acceptance of an operational review committee to consider customer service issues as well as long term rate allocations.
To date, we have made significant progress and have identified the remaining issues to be considered. Oak Lawn has agreed to commence preliminary engineering, at their own expense, that will include consideration of three (3) different alignments for the redundant line. In addition, monthly meetings have been set up to conduct a long term rate analysis.
Due to the fact that the existing agreement is due to expire as of October 1st, 2011, it is necessary for us to consider an extension that would provide sufficient time to complete negotiations on the new contract. Oak Lawn approved the extension at their Board meeting on September 27th.
Staff recommends that we take action on the extension at this time. It will provide for a one (1) year extension of the current agreement. Within that year, approximately nine (...
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