Lower Towamensing Township and Carbon Engineering have come to a settlement agreement.

Carbon Engineering will turn over the work they did on the sewer plan and the township will pay them $33,620.46. James Nanovic, the township’s solicitor, said this is the amount owed to the engineering company.

The payment had not been made, because Carbon Engineering would not turn over the documents to the township after ARRO Consulting Inc. was hired to work on the sewer line project.

The supervisors approved the settlement at their meeting Tuesday night.

Nanovic said Carbon Engineering will provide all of the CAD drawings, documents, etc. that the township has requested from them and will provide them to ARRO. The township will sign the CAD drawing waiver and will execute a neutral release and settlement agreement between Carbon Engineering and the township.

The documents were supposed to be turned over to the township on Tuesday night, but they weren’t.

“We were not completely happy with what happened today,” Nanovic said.

Douglas Kopp, a civil engineer with ARRO, met with Carbon Engineering on Tuesday, but he said there is a problem transferring the documents from one software to another.

Nanovic said the delay means the sewer project has “been put back a little bit further than we’d like for it to be.”

Kopp said he thinks the information he saw in the documents will be at least 60% useful to the project. Once he receives the files, he said it could take three to six months for plans to be ready for the township.

In the meantime, Nanovic said the township is going to set a maximum time frame for the documents to be transferred to ARRO, probably two weeks at most.

“We see a light that is going to occur at the end of the tunnel and we’re getting very close,” Nanovic said.

Supervisor Michael Takerer added, “And we look forward to a resolution of these problems that we’re encountering.”

Takerer also mentioned that he is concerned about the plans to use a gravity fed system for the sewer line.

“When I drove through Little Gap stretch a few weeks ago, it was a lake from the railroad tracks to the mountain, so my concern is how are we going to build a gravity system through that area that’s completely inundated with water periodically,” Takerer asked Kopp.

“It’s very difficult to keep a sewer in that situation anywhere close to water tight. No sewer is ever completely water tight,” Kopp said. “A prolonged submergence potentially with current, you’re going to get significant inflow at that point.”

Takerer said that he thinks the project is going to need grinder pumps to keep the flow moving.

“From my experience of what I saw, grinder pumps are a very good way to combat ground water and issues such as what we’re against,” Takerer said. “There’s going to be portions of the system that that’s going to be the way it’s going to have to go. If it goes gravity, that thing is just going to fill up with water and there’s going to be no movement of wastewater from any portions of the system.”

Kopp agreed the pump stations could be inundated with water. Takerer said he hopes Kopp will be able to easily identify the areas that will need grinder pumps.