FERRIDAY — If all goes right, Ferriday residents could get the boil-water notice that has been in place since May lifted as a Christmas present.

The town’s board of aldermen opened bids for a new tank to be built in the municipal water plant at Tuesday’s meeting, and the low bid came in at $476,000.

“It’s going to be a steal,” Mayor Glen McGlothin said.

That’s because everybody was counting on the new tank costing $700,000 on its own, not including engineering.

McGlothin said, including engineering, low bid for the tank would be approximately $600,000.

Once the new tank is in place and the department of health and hospitals gives it the OK, the town’s boil-water notice can be lifted.

The contractor with the low bid, Camo Construction of Vidalia, needs eight to 10 weeks to fabricate the new tank and another week or so to put it together on site, McGlothin said.

Before the final go-ahead is given for the tank construction to begin, the town attorney and engineer are reviewing the bid, and then the town finance committee will meet to ensure everything is in place.

After that, McGlothin said he could sign the order to build the tank.

“We just need to make sure we have all of our i’s dotted and all of our t’s crossed,” he said. The mayor said he hopes to have the bid back on his desk by Monday so he can meet with the finance committee immediately.

“We are hoping we can go ahead and expedite this,” he said.

Because the bid was lower than expected, McGlothin said it might be possible for the town to use some of the funds allocated for tank repair to repair other parts of the water plant, such as the filters, which have been problematic in recent months.

“We are going to try to fix those, too, and do an overhaul on that plant that will last three years, at which time we will hopefully have a new plant built,” he said.

After getting the existing plant in good enough repair to remove the boil-water notice, the next step for the town would be to put out a request for proposals for new water meters.

Many of the town’s existing water meters don’t work properly, and a 2007 audit of the water system cited that reason as why the system was losing money.

“Now is the time to get the meters in and start producing the revenue stream to pay for the (new) plant,” he said.

The boil-water notice was put in place not because of unsafe bacteria in the water, but because of a hole in the existing tank that formed in 2007. DHH protocol requires a boil-water notice be put in effect if a water storage tank is breached, regardless if the water tests clean of dangerous pathogens.