Memorandum
REPORT TO:
City Commission
FROM:
Brian Heaston, Engineer III
Shawn Kohtz, Director of Utilities
SUBJECT:
Authorize the City Manager to Sign Amendment 1 of the Professional Services Agreement with Morrison Maierle for the Municipal Groundwater Project
MEETING DATE:
October 6, 2026
AGENDA ITEM TYPE:
Agreement - Vendor/Contract
RECOMMENDATION:
Authorize the City Manager to Sign Amendment 1 of the Professional Services Agreement with Morrison Maierle for the Municipal Groundwater Project
STRATEGIC PLAN:
BACKGROUND:
The base professional services agreement (PSA) for the municipal groundwater project was authorized by the City Commission on February 4, 2025. The attached Amendment 1 provides for engineering design and oversight of the initial test well program for the project. The amendment also reconciles additional services requests made by the City for the project to date. A subsequent PSA amendment will be brought to the City Commission for well drilling and aquifer testing as a sub-contracted activity under Morrison Maierle’s PSA.
The initial test well program focuses on the City’s Leverich property located near the mouth of Leverich Canyon to investigate the site’s suitability for aquifer storage and recovery (ASR). Upon completion of well drilling, aquifer testing will be performed to obtain fundamental aquifer properties to assess whether the geologic structures accessible below the site are capable of storing significant volumes of water. Pending positive aquifer test results, the ASR project would move forward into the water rights permitting phase. To achieve the 5,810 acre-feet groundwater supply target in the adopted 2013 Integrated Water Resources Plan, the initial test well program must be expanded to other potential sites in addition to the Leverich site, subject to future PSA amendments, as it is unrealistic for the Leverich property alone to store as much as 5,810 acre-feet of water underground. However, based on initial hydrogeologic investigation, the Leverich site may provide a portion of the needed volume.
Upon successful results from a test well program, the water rights permitting phase follows the test well program and entails risks and capital outlays with no guaranteed outcome. The MT DNRC will not consider a water rights application to be “correct and complete”, and thus acceptable for review, unless all ASR wells needed to appropriate the volume of water requested in the application are constructed and tested in advance. The ASR wells must also be built to public water supply well standards before they may be tested, thereby necessitating design approval from MT DEQ prior to construction.
MT DNRC’s water rights application process workflow is linked here. MT DNRC has prepared guidance documents to guide agency staff and applicant practitioners through the water rights change and water rights permit application processes. The guidance is voluminous, totaling over 600 pages in length, serving as a proximate indicator of the complexity of the subject and why it takes multiple years to successfully navigate the review process to reach an approval.
UNRESOLVED ISSUES:
None.
ALTERNATIVES:
As suggested by the City Commission.
FISCAL EFFECTS:
The negotiated amount for Amendment 1 totals $204,360. Sufficient funding for the amendment is available in the FY27 capital improvement plan budget for project ‘WIF33 – Test Well & Mitigation System Program’.