City’s new fiscal year starts with water treatment, IT spending

QUINCY — The Quincy City Council met twice on Monday, with the first meeting to close out the old fiscal year and the second to start the new one.

The first meeting, held at 5:30 p..m. is called “sine die” (Latin for “without day”) and legally means the City Council leaves the final meeting of the prior fiscal year indefinitely. It’s a legal process and an annual rite as the Aldermen returned for their regular meeting at 7 p.m.

The Council then got to work on approving bids for the city’s water treatment plant, approving a $4.85 million bid from Leander Construction of Canton, Ill., to replace pumps, piping, motors and controls at the pump station.

Public Works Director Jeffrey Conte has broken the project down into separate bids in an attempt to cut costs after the overall bid came in at $15 million. The total project includes replacing a nearly 70 year old electrical system and reinforcing the building to keep the Mississippi River out of it when flood waters rise.

Conte told aldermen he was hoping to get that number down closer to $10 million by rebidding the project into chunks as Monday night’s action moved the City to about $5.7 million committed to the project to date, or about $2.5 million below where it would have been previously.

“I think we’re going to save between four and five million when it’s all done,” Conte said.

Aldermen also approved seven different bids from the IT department to begin the new fiscal year. Following a 2022 cyber attack on the city’s IT infrastructure, the City has taken several steps to upgrade its IT security.

Those actions included:

• $113,976 for annual software subscriptions making up a new enterprise-wide resource planning system. The comptroller’s office is still working to implement the system.
• $76,940 from CentralSquare Technologies, Inc. to renew the city’s annual financial and utility billing software contract.
• The city’s annual Microsoft 365 subscription for $60,902 from Dell Technologies.
• $36,878 from SHI Internation Corp. for two additional years of secure backup cloud storage under the Rubrik data recovery solution.
• $27,054 from SecureData Technologies, Inc. to renew the annual maintenance contract for CheckPoint firewall appliances.
• $23,858 with SHI International Corp., for an annual email security and archiving services contract with Barracuda Networks.
• $15,750 from Smartsheet Inc. for the city’s annual software service contract.

Alderman also:

• Tabled a vote on a new Tax Increment Financing District for two weeks so the Adams County Board can take action on it at its May 14 meeting.
• Approved a $223,105 bid from Kauffman Plumbing of Liberty for an on-call licensed plumbing contractor to replace 35 private side lead service lines during instances that require the City to make an emergency repair.
• Approved low bids for water treatment chemicals used by the Water Treatment Plant for the  2024/2025 Fiscal year.
• Approved a $17,637 quote from Rick’s Transit Repair for engine repairs on a Water Distribution dump truck.