The Belgrade City Council convened a workshop meeting on January 12, 2026, at 7:00 PM to discuss two major water-related agenda items: the Preliminary Engineering Report (PER) for the water storage expansion project and the city's water rights change application with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC). No public comments were received, and no formal votes were taken.
Water Storage Expansion Project (PER Presentation)
Water Rights Change Application Update
All right. I'll uh thank everybody for being here tonight. I'll call our Belgrade City Council workshop meeting uh to order. But uh first form of business, we'll put this in recess until our final council member arrives here. Should be about five minutes. All right, I'll call the meeting to order after our brief recess here. Uh so please stand and follow me in the pledge. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Roll call, please. Jason Guppy. Here. Uh Matthew McGee. Late but here. Jim Simon. Here. Michael Meath. Here. Christine? Here. Aaron Bell. Here. Renee Manimo. Here. Thank you. All right. Our first item on the discussion agenda is discuss the preliminary engineering report for the Belgrade water storage expansion project. Good evening, Mayor and Council. I'm Camry Iulia, the director of public works. We're here tonight to uh uh present the findings of the preliminary engineering report for the water storage expansion project that's been in the works for uh the last several months. Um so uh I'm gonna hand it over to uh Jarrett Moran. Uh Jarrett is uh professional engineer with HDR. Um his team specializes in pipeline storage, uh pumping system, so really good fit for this project, and uh we're really excited uh for you guys to finally get to see what everybody's been working on. Let's see. Okay. Thank you, Mayor Cam Mayor and Council uh for the opportunity to give a presentation on the update for where the water storage expansion project currently sits. Um as Camry mentioned, I'm Jared Moran, uh project manager for the project for HDR and leading the team from the PER stage into the design, subsequent design phases. Um I guess we'll start off with kind of where things stand now. So as of today, um PER is in draft format, it was submitted last week uh to Camry and staff for review and and to you as well for review. So once we have all review comments uh incorporated and any um concerns addressed, we will incorporate those comments and concerns into a final revised version of the PER and um get that submitted to Camerie and her staff as well for uh kind of to document the end of the PER stage and then kind of set us up for transitioning into design. Umsequent to our development of the PER, um we have had subconsultant work occurring to try to keep some you know some concurrent work going that we'll need for a subsequent design. So two of our subconsultants, one is aspect, they're the hydrogeological subconsultant. Um they have been doing a preliminary well design uh tech memo that's gonna be incorporated in or that is incorporated into the PER. Um, but they're also ready at this point in time to start the well the permanent well design for the project for the two proposed wells that'll be a part of the project. Um we've also had Pioneer uh starting the end of last year do their preliminary field work from a geotechnical and survey standpoint. That information is gonna be lumped into design. So the fact that they're already doing that and they should be wrapped up by the end of this week. Um we'll be able to pull that in and incorporate that into the design as we start here in the next several weeks. So kind of shave a little bit of time off of the entire effort by having that occur while the PER was being developed. So for demands and storage volumes, this kind of sets the precedent for the entire project kind of from the base up.