The clock is ticking for the City of Jeanerette as the board and Mayor Carol Bourgeois Jr. attempt to get crucial grant funding for rehabilitating the town’s sewer plant. 

Although the project has been in the works for several years, this year the scope of the project changed from constructing a completely new wetlands system after insurmountable obstacles were presented to the board. 

But questions still remain for the sewer rehab project, most notably whether the radical change in scope will be approved by the state Water Sector Commission, who Jeanerette officials are relying on to fund the project. 

“We’re not going to get an answer until the Water Sector Commission has their meeting, which is at the end of July,” a representative from engineering firm Sellars and Associates said at the meeting. 

Engineers introduced a tentative schedule on what the project would look like pending the approval of the grant, but also noted that they could not provide hard numbers because they had not been provided the pricing as of yet. 

Jeanerette has planned to update its sewer plant through a mix of capital outlay, the Water Sector Commission grant and a loan from the Department of Environmental Quality. Although about $500,000 had already been spent by the city on the prior wetlands assimilation project, once it became unfeasible the town essentially lost that funding. 

“So this is a whole new thing? We’ve already spent a lot of money rehabbing this plant,” Mayor Pro Tem Tia Simmons asked. 

Along with the change in scope, other suggestions like a grit removal system to prevent sludge from entering oxidation was also suggested as part of the new scope of work, with some board members becoming more frustrated with the rising costs of the project. 

After an hour of discussion, the board decided to table the issue until a scope of work with pricing could be provided, which project leaders suspected would happen in the next week.