Dam Management

Its been 33+ years since the last major repair and the Thomas Pond Dam is showing signs of its age.  On 12/12/24 the TPIA Board voted to select a vendor and bring to the Membership a motion to approve spending up to $50,000 to repair and improve the dam.

On 1/23/25 at a Special Meeting of the Members, a quorum being present or having provided proxies to those in attendance, the Membership of TPIA voted to approve the expenditures to repair and improve the dam by a vote of 54 to 1.  The Vendor has been notified and given a notice to proceed.  Repairs are planned to begin November 3, 2025.

TPIA thanks the towns of Casco and Raymond, each of which is contributing funding to help with the dam repairs.  With the contributions from the towns and funds contributed by TPIA Members, we have raised sufficient funds to cover the contract price and reasonable contingencies should there be unexpected problems found when conducting the work. 

In addition there are several other improvements that TPIA intends to make this year as part of this project, including:

• a new hold down device to keep stop logs properly in place,
• new cedar stop logs for the rear slot using a tongue and groove design to reduce seepage,
• and a scaffolding aluminum plank (installed 7/2025)

In 2020 TPIA had a civil engineer who lives on the Pond do a visual inspection of the Dam.  They determined that the degredation we were seeing was not structural.  We’ve been keeping a close eye on it since.

In September 2023 TPIA obtained an estimate of $19,000 to repair the concrete and add protective plating to prevent future damage to the dam structure.  We realized that we needed to raise substantial funds to be able to afford to repair the dam and we opted to go with a more formal Request for Proposals process.  We initially set a fund-raising target of $25,000.

In 2024 after the annual meeting we began to develop a Request for Proposals (RFP) to find a contractor to make the repairs to the dam.  In August we reached out to engineering firms to seek a proposal for them to review/provide input on the draft RFP.   That didn’t pan out.

Instead we held a work party on 9/7 to remove debris, apply temporary patches to damaged areas, and better identify areas in need of repair, effectively performing the visual assessment ourselves.  We discovered more extensive damage to the concrete than previously identified, so we increased the proposed budget for repairs and set our fund raising goal to $35,000.

We updated the draft RFP based on this assessment and released the RFP on 9/30.  As part of the release process we identified 6 potential contractors that had experience performing dam repairs in this part of Maine.  We successfully contacted 5 of these, and also posted the RFP to a public site that aggregates a large variety of RFPs for contractors and service providers.

Three Contractors submitted bids in response to our RFP.  While none of the bids were perfect, we deemed two of the bids worthy of follow-up.  We submitted a list of questions to these bidders, and in evaluating the responses we identified the bid that the TPIA evaluators unanimously agreed best meets our needs.

We notified the vendor of their pending selection and requested they perform some testing on the dam to de-risk the final proposal and determine if some optional work should be performed.  The vendor did this and produced a final bid which included one of two optional items.

The expected cost of this work is now $39,450 + some minor excluded expense items such as abutter and member notifications, new stop logs, etc.  For contingency and extra expense purposes we are ensuring that TPIA has on-hand a spendable reserve of about 20%, or $8,000.  This yields a total project budget of $47,450. 

In December 2024 the TPIA Board voted to move forward with the Dam Repairs and request authorization from the Members to expend the funds needed to complete the Dam Repair.  We did this by holding a Special Meeting of the Members in January 2025.

The Members overwhelmingly approved the dam repairs at the special meeting on January 23, 2025.  TPIA sent the vendor a Notice to Proceed shortly after the meeting to secure our spot on their schedule.

TPIA requested funding assistance from the towns of Casco and Raymond as we were unable to raise sufficient funds solely from our Members. Both towns placed items on their town warrants and approved funding for TPIA. The combination of funds raised from Members and the towns covers the project budget.

TPIA and the Contractor agreed on a start date of November 3, 2025.  The vendor estimates work should take about 2 1/2 weeks to complete, plus some additional time for the concrete to cure before we can resume normal dam operations. 

TPIA opted to delay the start to November in order to minimize the impact on seasonal uses of Thomas Pond, as we expect to draw down pond levels slightly earlier and more than normal to facilitate the dam repairs.