The City of Floresville has been approved for a loan from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to fund various improvements projects for the City’s public drinking water system. The total amount of the loan is approximately $3.719 million which will be used to make the required improvements. The improvements projects will be grouped into three construction packages that are described as follows:
Construction Package No. 1 (Ram II)
- Construct a new welded steel ground storage tank at the Plaza Water Plant to replace the previously demolished bolted steel ground storage tank there.
- Provide hookups for a mobile generator at the City’s three water treatment and storage sites. This will allow City staff to provide water to the City’s customers in the event of a citywide power outage.
- Improve the water system monitoring devices at the three water treatment and storage sites so that the City will be able to better monitor water production and distribution.
- Refurbish the existing aeration tanks at the three water treatment and storage sites so that the City will be able to better control taste and odor in the water provided to its customers.
- Ram II General Contractor Inc. started its business 42 years ago in January, 1975. Ralph A. Minard II is President and 100-percent owner and stockholder. Ram II specializes in water, sewer and drainage piping projects to include specialization in water and sewer plant construction and rehabilitation. Their company also builds lift stations and erects ground storage water tanks. They have worked on projects funded by TXCDBG, TWDB, USDA and TXDOT for the past 40 years. They have completed numerous projects for the City of Floresville for the past 25 years. They presently employ 20 full-time employees. Ram II recently completed a new 12-inch sewer line with 11 sanitary sewer manholes and two bores for the City of Floresville and completed the project 2 months ahead.
Construction Package No. 2 (RG3)
- Replace the existing water meters throughout the City with new meters that will enable City staff to collect meter data without having to
make a manual read of the meters. The data from the meters will be gathered by a signal sent to a laptop computer as staff drives that meter’s
location. - The RG3 companies are composed of a manufacturing division (Meter Company) and a service division (Utilities). RG3’s legacy companies span back to 1950. Their installation crews have installed over two million meter system units of every manufacturer available in North America including Itron, Neptune, Sensus, Hersey, Elster, Master Meter, Badger and, of course, RG3. RG3 uses NO subcontractors for its install crews. They also have the best warranty in the industry, offering a 23-year (12 full/11 prorated for AMI systems) replacement on all endpoint technology (register, battery, transmitter) compared to 10 years on competitors encoder, and 20 years (10 full/10 prorated) on competitors battery and transmitter. RG3 offers the longest new meter accuracy warranty (Perpetual Meters) in the industry (10 years and 1.5 million gallons) compared to most competitors’ new meter accuracy of 5 years and 750,000 gallons. Each endpoint can be read as a drive-by (AMR) or in a fixed network (AMI) with no programming or register transmission power mode changes. If Fixed Network Transceivers are in place, the utility can read seamlessly using either method (AMR or AMI) or both at the same time. This allows the utility to start out as a drive-by system and upgrade to an AMI system at a later date.
Construction Package No. 3 (M&C Fonseca)
- Modifications will be made to the City’s water distribution system that will provide flexibility in the system for staff to move water throughout
the system to increase supply in cases of abnormally high demand. - Several water mains in the downtown area will be replaced with new PVC mains. The downtown area is the oldest part of the system and many of the water mains there are made from cast iron. As the cast-iron pipes degrade, there are noticeable effects on the quality of the water that flows through them. This project will replace the oldest lines with new PVC.
- Matias Fonseca and his wife Carmen Fonseca started M&C Fonseca Construction Co. Inc. in 2001. M&C Fonseca was a small concrete construction business of just 5 employees that concentrated on only residential concrete slabs within a 30-mile radius of Matias’ home in Granite Shoals, Texas. In 2003, M&C Fonseca Construction Co. Inc. was incorporated and then had a total of 12 employees. They bid their first commercial underground utility project and won the bid with the City of Kerrville in 2011. Since then, they began to concentrate more on underground utilities for cities and municipalities in the surrounding areas. M&C Fonseca Construction Co. Inc. is now located at 1901 Prairie Creek Road and employs 27 permanent employees in the utility division, 13 employees in the concrete division, 2 superintendents, and 6 office personnel.