STEUBENVILLE — Phase II of the city’s water filtration plant upgrade could get started sooner rather than later.

City Council Tuesday authorized City Manager Jim Mavromatis to advertise for bids for the project, which includes construction of the fourth pulsator, a fifth filter and a complete supervisory control and data acquisition upgrade.

Pulsators are how dirt, organics and other icky things in the raw, untreated river water are removed. The filters remove what the pulsators don’t get, while the SCADA system lets the department monitor and operate the water system remotely.

Individually, the updates are important. Collectively, they’ll improve plant performance and reliability, Water Supervisor Jim Jenkins said.

“We’re basically modernizing it, so to speak,” he told council, pointing out the SCADA upgrade alone “is the most needed, as it’s what we use to control the plant operations.”

The current SCADA was installed in 2007, he said, adding that, as with any computer, “It’s outdated the moment you buy it.” He said they can’t even find replacement parts anymore and “they’ve scoured everything for spare parts, and we’ve got as much as we can … so we’re lucky where we’re at that we haven’t had any more major issues with the SCADA system.”

He told council the project would “just basically be upgrading the computers themselves and the relays and different things that are out of the system, how everything talks … everything will look the same, it’s just the main components into the computers will be updated.”

Jenkins said the city has had water outages “due to the plant performance,” adding what they’re going to be done now “is what was originally designed in 2005, when they started construction on the plant,” he said. “These items were cut from the project due to rising costs (20 years ago.)”

The engineer’s estimate is $20.4 million, but those are intended to be higher than the actual bid amount. He said city officials tried twice — unsuccessfully — to get congressional funding for the work, and they’ll have to borrow the money to pay for the upgrade. The good news is that, based on a recent rate analysis study — which looks at everything from water rates and what residents pay per usage, to the infrastructure funds — “the water department, including this new debt, is healthy into the future.”

“We also have some major debts falling off (the books) by the time this project is completed and we start to pay it off,” he said. “The plant loan will be falling off, and the pump station will be falling off so that we’re kind of replacing debt. So, that’s why it’s really not affecting us.”

Even better, he said they’ll be able to pay cash for about $1 million a year in mainline replacements “for the foreseeable future.”

“It’s taken a long time,” he told council. “Unfortunately, we’re catching up with old demons. And, you know, once Phase II is completed, I feel like we’ll finally be caught up with all the old demons that should have, would have, could have been done that weren’t, and now we actually getting to where we need to be, which is replacing the actual infrastructure itself.

Council also voted to release the $5,000 previously committed from the mayor’s account to the Steubenville Cultural Trust to advertise the 2025 Nutcracker Village, but questions arose about future allocations to community events after Fifth Ward Councilman Ted Gorman proposed they continue to fund Fourth of July fireworks, Juneteenth and the Cultural Trust and Nutcracker Village, but build in funds for the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church’s Greek Festival, Dean Martin Festival and Historic Fort Steuben’s Christmas celebration, which runs in tandem with the Nutcracker Village.

He proposed they consider upping the mayor’s budget allotment to $60,000 — $40,000 for the two national holidays ($30,000 for fireworks and $10,000 for Juneteenth) — plus $5,000 each for the other activities.

“Those four events are major,” Gorman said. “Those are what brings people into town, but, more important, it’s what brings our community together.”

Not everyone was on board, however, including Councilman at large Joel Walker, who said he doesn’t like the idea of funding festivals, as well as Fourth Ward Councilman Royal Mayo, who argued Juneteenth — which commemorates the day when the last slaves in America learned they were free — merits a more even funding split.

“Those other things are community celebrations, but they’re not national holidays,” Mayo insisted. “We can’t just handpick four of them and leave some of them out.”

Third Ward Councilwoman Heather Hoover said she would support putting the money in the mayor’s account and giving him the discretion to allocate as he sees fit, but accountability needs to be built into the process to ensure the money is used for its intended purpose.

“I think that upgrading the budget and allowing those funds to be there for those special groups is a great idea, but there needs to be some checks and balances,” she said.

Walker though, said council is “going down a slippery slope” by passing out funds to community groups.

“The minute we start giving money out to one organization, we have to keep passing it out to each organization,” he said, telling Mayo he agrees that “we just go with Fourth of July and Juneteenth and that’s it. No more cultural trust, no Greek festival, no Dean Martin — nothing.”

Council also:

• Passed emergency legislation authorizing Mavromatis to seek bids for oil and gas mineral rights under several city-owned properties, including Beatty Park and the old landfill

• Signed off on a resolution recognizing October as Italian-American Heritage Month.

• Requested more information from Law Director Costa Mastros about filing liens on properties they’re demolishing. While the city already liens properties to recover their costs, in many cases the value of the properties after demolition doesn’t come close to covering what it costs to tear them down.