designed, ready to go,” Boisvert says. When the stimulus money became available, Pennichuck Water jumped at it. It was the “cheapest money you could get for infrastructure improvements,” with 50% being essentially a grant and 50% being a loan carrying an interest rate of 3.74% or less, he says.

Pennichuck received $2.1 million in stimulus funding to replace about two miles of 100-plus-year-old pipe in Nashua, N.H., to connect a water system in Milford, N.H., to a new supply source and replace an aging water storage tank.

In Florida, the city of Palm Bay is to receive about $3 million in stimulus funds to help lay new water lines to about 1,000 new homes. Voters had rejected a special assessment for the new water lines, and the credit crisis made obtaining bonds cost-prohibitive, so the city had to sacrifice some capital projects, including one of those now funded by the ARRA money, says Jason Yarborough, Palm Bay utilities director.

Stimulus funding is allowing Atlantic City to replace the 70-year-old supports for its water pipes, a $3.5-million effort that the city had on the books but only was able to tackle in a piecemeal fashion because of lack of funding. Stimulus funding “has definitely spurred us to do more,” Goldfine says.

Because the stimulus package favors projects from small communities, larger cities with larger funding needs are receiving less of the stimulus money. That leaves cities such as Indianapolis searching for ways to pay for more than $4 billion in infrastructure projects it anticipates needing over the next 20 years. The city is entertaining offers from United Water, Englewood, Colo.-based CH2M Hill and others to operate its water system as a way of reducing its costs and more cheaply upgrade its system. Two utilities in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the Dallas Water Utilities and the Tarrant Regional Water District, will work together to obtain bond financing for a $1.9-billion, 179-mile pipeline expected to be built starting in 2014.

In New Mexico, the $185-million-plus Buckman Direct Diversion project is moving forward in Santa Fe without stimulus funding. The project will divert up to 21 millions gallons of water a day from the Rio Grande and the recently completed San Juan-Chama diversion project and pipe it underground 11 miles to a new 15-mgd treatment plant. That facility will deliver drinking water for city and county water-system customers. The project is being designed and built by a joint venture of CH2M Hill and Denver-based Western Summit Constructors.

Other utilities, like the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, are forging ahead with projects because they had funding in place when the credit markets froze up last year. San Francisco voters approved a bond issue in 2003 for the 86-project program.

San Francisco also has been able to take advantage of the competitive bidding environment: The utility’s bids are coming in 25% lower than engineering estimates. Nine recently bid projects, estimated to cost $289.7 million, instead will cost $220.8 million, report officials.

“In the last 18 months we haven’t awarded one contract that went over our engineering estimates,” Labonte says. “The lack of the number of projects is forcing contractors to cut their profit margins.”

Labonte says she’s eager to see what the results of bidding will be for a five-mile water-supply tunnel beneath San Francisco Bay, the first tunnel ever to be built under the bay.

Engineering estimates pegged the tunnel’s cost at $260 million, and Labonte says bidding may not be as competitive because of the special nature of the job. The lower bid prices will offset overruns on other parts of the program, including relocating portions of a water treatment plant that were located directly atop the San Andreas Fault, she says.

To some, the influx of stimulus money combined with lower contracting and materials prices all point to a long overdue reinvestment into the nation’s water and wastewater systems.

“Quite truthfully, if you look at this country’s history for infrastructure improvements, there have been golden periods,” says Goldfine. “We haven’t done anything in this country since the late 1970s. This stimulus money will put a big dent in that need.”