MILLINOCKET – Better water service and improved infrastructure will be available by Nov. 1 to residents in the Pines section thanks to a $1.9 million construction project that began in earnest this week, officials said Thursday.

After preliminary work last week, workers from Lou Silver General Contractors of Veazie were beginning to dig trenches to place underground pipelines from the neighborhood’s water and sewer pumping station, said Matthew Kladder, a supervisor on-site.

“We are having a hard time, struggling with high groundwater,” Kladder said Wednesday. “It makes the work a bit slower.”

The project involves the replacement or upgrade of more than 5,000 linear feet of sewer lines, water main, storm runoff drains and roads on Katahdin Avenue Extension, Iron Bridge Road and part of Katahdin Avenue in the northern part of town.

It is due to be hooked up by Nov. 1, with final repaving to occur in the spring, Town Manager Eugene Conlogue said.

The work is somewhat behind schedule, and off to a slow start, Conlogue said, but he expressed some confidence that the contractor could make up for lost time.

“We have been working on this for several years and a lot during the last two years getting it going,” Conlogue said. “It’s good to have a contractor in place and, hopefully, once he gets going in earnest it will happen very quickly.”

Residents in that area can expect some traffic delays, dust and noise, but nothing too onerous, Conlogue said. A letter warning of these hazards went out in May.

The project is mostly paid for with a combination of a $500,000 Community Development Block Grant, a $1.05 million loan from the Maine Municipal Bond Bank SRF Fund and $270,000 from the town wastewater department’s capital reserve fund. Another $350,000 is coming from Aqua Maine Inc., which supplies town water, for a project they are doing in conjunction with this, Conlogue said.

The wastewater minimum quarterly rate of $37.50 – which represents a rate of $2.50 per 100 cubic feet of water for the first 1,500 cubic feet – rose to $42.50 under the rate increase that the Town Council accepted. The rate increase came as part of plans to fund the project.

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