Big Spring City Council approved the emergency reading of an agreement with Atmos for a proposed rate increase during its meeting Tuesday night and City Finance Director Peggy Walker said the deal will save local customers more than $5 million.

“On Aug. 29 Atmos filed a rate increase request with the city of Big Spring, as well as other cities in the West Texas division,” said Walker. “We recently adopted a rate review mechanism with Atmos, which allows us to sit down and negotiate. Their initial request was for a $9.5 million increase. We have negotiated a $3.9 million increase, which will equate to about a 3 percent increase, or $1.95 or $1.98 for the average residential or commercial customer.

“We believe this negotiated settlement is better than we would have received if we had gone through pro-rated negotiations or actually gone into litigation.”

The council approved the negotiated rate increase request by a unanimous vote.

Also during Tuesday's meeting, Butch Davis, engineer with Parkhill Smith & Cooper and project coordinator for the city's ongoing bond projects, told council members the final project in the multi-million dollar list of voter-approved projects is set to begin soon.

“This will be the final project from the 2006 bond election the citizens approved. In this project we plan to repave about 42 blocks of city streets, along Main Street, Scurry Street and the downtown area,” said Davis. “With that project we'll be doing various sidewalk improvements, as well as ADA curb ramps, and if we're able to do all of the curb ramps we have in this project, it will be right at 100 ramps that will be installed. It also includes street-scape improvements, at least as much as the budget will allow.”

Davis said the effort has been broken up into several alternative projects, allowing the city to take the bond project as far as its budget will carry it.

“We anticipate having about $7.6 million available for construction,” said Davis. “We're hoping that will give us enough to do all the items in the bid package. We've broken it into several alternatives we'll be able to award as the budget allows.”

And while improvements to the rough and aging roadways in downtown Big Spring will certainly be embraced by local motorists, Davis said the project has the potential to be a pain-in-the-neck to residents during its 13-month construction time.

“We anticipate opening bids Jan. 9, and bringing them back to the council Jan. 13 for your consideration. At that point we'll do a notice of procedure for the contractor Feb. 9. Construction is expected to take approximately 13 months, so we're targeting April 1, 2010, as our completion date. This is probably going to be the most visible of the bond projects, and probably cause the most public inconvenience, so it could become the most vocal and most controversial. However, it's a project that's very much needed.”