St. Clair wins $3.6 million grant for new water tower

By Jim Bloch

The city of St. Clair has won a $3.6 million grant that will help pay for a new water tower in the Christian B. Haas Industrial Park. The park sits on the east side of Range Road, south of Yankee Road.

City Superintendent Quentin Bishop announced the award at the regular meeting of the city council March 3.

“If you’ve driven by EPC recently in the industrial park, you’ll see cranes,” said Bishop, as heard on the CTV-Channel 6 recording of the meeting posted on YouTube. “You’ll see bulldozers. You’ll see a lot of earth work. What they’re building out there is a booster station. They’re going to be installing water mains and they’re building an 80-foot water tower.”

The booster station will increase the water pressure to allow the water to be distributed more widely. The tower will have a 500,000-gallon capacity. The building of the massive Magna plant in the city’s newer industrial park, north of Yankee Road, made the water tower necessary. Fishbeck, the Grand Rapids based civil engineering firm, designed the project, which is part of the $10+ million modernization of the city’s water plant on Adams Street and its shorewell pump station on the St. Clair River.

“It’s not to improve capacity around the city,” Bishop said. “It’s in relation to the footprint of the overall Local Development Finance Authority or the industrial park. There was a $3.6 million grant on the line through the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. We have secured that grant. Those final agreements were signed off today. So, what happens now is that the money is going to be sitting at the state until the attorneys at the state sign off. Our attorney works so much quicker than that. I wish he was on it.”

Jim Downey, of the Algonac-based firm of Kane, Clemons, Joachim & Downey, is the city attorney.

“But the state is a different story,” said Bishop. “So, we’re working though that. I fully expect that we should (soon) have access to those monies and start getting reimbursed for all those expenses we’ve had.”

Bishop praised the patience of the vendors on the job who have “waited and waited” for payment.