A Florence company has been awarded a contract to install improvements at the city of Vicksburg’s water treatment plant on Haining Road.

The Board of Mayor and Aldermen on Friday awarded the contract to Hemphill Construction Co. to make the changes at the plant. The project, which is being funded through a state infrastructure loan, is expected to increase the water plant’s capacity.

Hemphill was the lone bidder with a bid of $2,930,985, which was $830,985 more than the project’s estimated $2.1 million cost. Mayor George Flaggs Jr. said the difference will be made up using money from an $11 million infrastructure loan the city made in Nov. 2021.

“We moved some money around,” he said.

The improvements were included in a July 2021 report on the city’s water system by Houston, Texas-based Trilogy Engineering, which was hired by the board to perform an assessment of the city’s water system after the February 2021 ice storm that shut it down. The board later hired Trilogy to serve as the project’s engineer.

According to the proposal from Trilogy, the project involved installing two parallel lines adjacent to two existing lines between the clarifier and filter; a backwash pump at the plant’s existing location and a new on-site groundwater well installation on the plant property.

When the report on the system was presented, David Peters, senior project manager for Trilogy, said the plant has the capacity of treating up to 16 million gallons of water per day, but the pipes carrying water to the plant’s clarifier, which is used to soften the water during the treatment process by mixing lime during the process, developed deposits and are constricted, reducing the plant’s maximum capacity to 10 or 11 MGD.

“We’re trying to go from 11 million gallons a day to about 21 to 22 million gallons a day and a new well,” Flaggs said in March when the city advertised the project for bid. “This will clear us for the port (expansion).”