Having only received one bid overbudget for the wastewater treatment plant expansion project, the Pilot Point City Council opted to select Wall Engineering as the Construction Manager at Risk for the project instead.
By having Wall, the city’s engineering firm, manage the project, the city can bid out each portion of the project.
“It’s basically a project manager that would oversee and then open for bids on individual items to construct the wastewater treatment plant,” Public Works Director Nestor Ramirez said. “The benefit … is the open transparency of having all bids being … not only selected by price but also by qualifications.”
Wall will supervise the “day to day operations,” and the process will also allow the city to have smaller portions of the project bid separately, giving local businesses an opportunity to be part of the process.
“It will have potentially multiple bidding opportunities [for] local [companies] and also from outside the city,” Ramirez said.
The city did not anticipate only receiving one bid, Ramirez said, because there were multiple companies that attended the preview meeting.
“But at the point that it was time for opening the bids, we only received one and it exceeded our estimated cost of construction by a considerable amount,” he added.
City Manager Britt Lusk added that with so many communities working on water projects, the supply of contractors is pretty thin.
“There’s that much work in North Texas,” he said. “Everybody’s growing in North Texas. Everybody needs water stuff. Everybody needs wastewater stuff, so that’s one part of it.”
The city staff is also confident that the project will come in on time and under budget.
“Opening for a [bigger] pool of applicants will likely create some competition,” Ramirez said.
The council rejected the bid and approved Wall Engineering as the CMAR.
Also in the meeting, the council accepted the FY2026 budget, which was delayed because of delays in the former auditor, Eide Bailly, sharing information with the new firm, MWH Group, represented by Valerie Halverson at the meeting.
The city received an unmod- ified, clean audit with one material weakness identified that was caused by the previous auditing firm, not city staff.
The issue revolved around a bond that needed to be accounted for in different funds because part of the proceeds were for capital improvement projects while the rest were to be split into and to come out of the water fund.
“There was $11 million that needed to go to the water fund, so they figured that out and moved it to the water fund,” Halverson said. “They did not remove it from the capital improvement fund, so it just created this duplicate of cash being recorded in both places.”
The council also awarded the contract for administering the Homeowner Rehabilitation Assistance Program to Kathryn Boyles with the KBB Consulting.
It will be up to the council to decide how much to set aside for rehabilitation projects each fiscal year, Assistant City Manager Michele Sanchez said.
She also gave a detailed overview of the city’s current fund balances.
Sanchez then presented the requests for various personnel additions, equipment and other expenses that have been made for the upcoming budget that added up to $5.5 million.
“There is no way we’re going to fund all these requests,” Sanchez said. “But right now, our usual process is we meet with all the departments. We get their biggest wish list of everything they could ever want and then we start to make cuts.”
She asked the council to send her input on the first draft to help her whittle the budget down.
One unavoidable expense will be getting the new fire station outfitted with personnel and equipment.
The city has again applied for a SAFER grant to attempt to defray some of those costs.
In addition, the city will again evaluate its salaries for any positions that are not within 10% of the market-rate goal and will apply a cost-of-living adjustment to any positions that are still in that range.
Following executive session, the council approved an ILA with the Town of Little Elm regarding participation in the 2026 Ironman Americas event as part of the bicycle route for the triathlon in March.
During public forum, Cindy Faris asked the council to look into the issue of feral cats throughout town, including mentioning that other cities have trapped feral cats to adopt out as barn cats.
