SOUTHWEST HARBOR — A bid of $691,949 has won Sargent Corporation of Stillwater the job of installing a new 350,000-gallon water tank here.

The board of selectmen accepted the bid at their July 31 meeting.

Earlier this year, the board voted to buy a concrete tank from Natgun Corporation for $375,000. It will replace a leaky 300,000-gallon metal tank that was built in 1959. Demolition of that tank is to start around the end of this month.

The town’s other water tank, with a capacity of nearly 1.1 million gallons, was built in 1990 and is still in good shape.

Voters at the May town meeting authorized the board to borrow up to $696,000 at an interest rate of 1.5 percent from the Maine Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) for the water tank project. The DHHS’s Division of Environmental Health administers a Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, which uses state and federal money to finance capital improvements for community water systems.

Last year, the town hired Olver Associates, an environmental engineering firm in Winterport, to conduct an engineering study and prepare a design plan and specifications for the new water tank.

Annaleis Hafford, Olver’s vice president and senior process engineer, told the selectmen last week that site preparation and upgrades will account for about $143,000 of Sargent’s installation price.

“I know there is a tank there now, but in today’s world, we have to make sure the tank base is prepared properly, and what’s there now is not okay for the new tank,” she said. “So, they have to remove a lot of ledge and materials.

“In all the work that’s been done there over the years, they never removed one single pipe that was underground,” she said. “They just left all that stuff there, and it needs to come out of the ground to do this right.”

The project also will include constructing a new driveway around the tank and a new shed to house the telemetry equipment that monitors the water tanks. Ms. Hafford said the existing shed has “a leaking roof, vermin infestation and inadequate access.”

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