Five contractors have submitted bids to replace a 46-year-old part at the city’s wastewater treatment plant on Rifle Range Road.

The Board of Mayor and Aldermen Monday accepted the bids to replace the part, known as an automatic bar screen, and took them under advisement.

Submitting bids were Electro-Mech Inc. of Richland, $241,144; Greenbriar Digging Service LP of Brookhaven, $227,800; Hemphill Construction of Florence, 269,580; J.S. Haren Co. of Athens, Tennessee, $254,000, and Tucker Creel-The Creel Co. of Mobile, Alabama, $316,000.

Public works director Garnet Van Norman said the bar screen was installed in 1972 when the plant went on line.

“When the waste comes into the wastewater plant, the bar screen pulls any debris in it out, and it goes into a dumpster,” he said. The present bar screen, he said, “Is worn completely out and we need to get a new one.”

Van Norman said the new screen assembly will be bar screen and conveyor system that will take the debris out of the building and take it to the dumpster. Before, he said, the debris went into trash bins and taken by employees and dumped into a dumpster.