County Receives Bids to Fix Steele City Road

Jefferson County has received seven bids to replace the road between Steele City and the Kansas state line.After weeks of negotiations, an agreement has been reached between Jefferson County and TC Energy, the company formerly known as TransCanada, to replace the road that was damaged by months of TC Energy trucks driving between Steele City and the oil spill site at Mill Creek in Kansas. During the course of the oil spill cleanup, an estimated 100 trucks a day traversed the road between Steele City and Washington County, Kansas, for several months. TC Energy was using those trucks to transport oil-contaminated dirt from the Keystone Pipeline oil spill site in Kansas, which occurred in December of 2022, to a landfill in Douglas County, Nebraska. In addition, “clean” dirt was taken by truck from a TC Energy property in Steele City to the oil spill site for restoration.While the trucks are no longer running, the damage is done. The road is now pitted with potholes and littered with broken asphalt. The contract was signed on Tuesday, December 12, 2023, and specifies a “maximum cost” of $3,334,802 for the construction, including $350,000 for the ‘engineering cost’, the total to be paid by TC Energy. Any costs over and above that will be paid by the county.The bids were opened at a meeting of the Jefferson County Commissioners on Tuesday, January 23, 2024. None of the seven bids were under the contract's “maximum cost,” though some were closer than others. The bids were:CL Construction of Wahoo: $4,028,000.11Constructors Inc. of Lincoln: $3,890,328.48K2 Construction of Lincoln: $4,637,256.10Cedar Valley Paving, LLC of Waterloo, Iowa: $3,516,816.12Werner Construction Inc. of Hastings: $3,786,248.62Graham Construction, Inc. of Omaha: $3,799,296.30Bauer Infrastructure of Martel: $4,807,900.30The county is not obligated to accept the lowest bid if there are other factors that make another bid more desirable. Commissioners did not select a bid at the meeting. Instead, County Engineer Tim Farmer will review the bids. He told commissioners, “I need to evaluate and check the math and everything.”A decision will be made at the next meeting of the commissioners on Tuesday, January 30.

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