VIENNA — Members of the county’s Water Advisory Panel gained a better idea of where projects in the county stand thanks to an update from its sanitary engineer.

The 12-person panel had its second meeting at the Trumbull County Sanitary Engineer’s Office on Thursday. The board was formed earlier this year, following Trumbull County Commissioner Tony Bernard’s call for the group’s formation and a state performance audit — the first conducted on the county water department in its 58-year history — at an April 1 meeting.

The panel is only able to bring recommendations before the county commissioners for their approval.

As part of its new business, sanitary engineer Gary Newbrough provided the board with a spreadsheet of the county’s pending projects. Out of all of them, he said his office was concerned with the six on the bottom, all of which are water projects.

Newbrough said Blueprint Phase 2 will be the next one to go, receiving $3.2 million in principal forgiveness to build the project. He said the commissioners already have awarded $435,000 in American Rescue Plan funds toward the phase’s engineering.

Newbrough said the project still has several steps to complete to get the principal forgiveness, such as an application, which he said he’s trying to find time to get in.

“Then I’m ready to make this a public hearing; we have until June 1 of next year to award the construction contract to stay eligible for the principal forgiveness,” Newbrough said. “I’m hoping to get this thing bid out probably right after the first of the year.”

Newbrough also gave an update on the Stillwagon Road project, for which they’ve held two public hearings because they had a single section of that road they were focused on originally. However, that changed after residents on Anderson Morris Road questioned why they weren’t included in the project.

“The commissioners heard their pleas at this public hearing and told me to expand the project; we had a second public hearing for these 12 people over on Anderson Morris Road,” Newbrough said. “Now the whole thing is approved by the residents out there for an assessment project, but we have to get some engineering done — in order to combine those two projects into one.”

Newbrough said the Champion-Bazetta water booster pump is in the design phase by the Environmental Design Group, a civil engineering, planning and design firm based in Akron.

“It is a pump station to be put right out in the front yard of the Warren Water Treatment Plant on Elm Road,” Newbrough said. “And what it’s going to do is supply our Champion and Bazetta district straight from the plant.”

Newbrough said as things are, water going into the district passes through the Warren water grid’s network before reaching Champion — resulting in quality issues.

“We need to get this water all the way out to West Farmington; we can’t have that much age on the water,” Newbrough said. “This booster pump is going to solve this problem for us and be able to shoot us fresh water out of the plant and send it right over into the Champion water tower.”

He said the next three projects are petitions his office has received, having yet to get a request for qualifications for engineering designs services — leaving them on the back burner for now.

As for the Champion-Bazetta water booster pump, Blueprint Phase 2’s engineering and Stillwagon Road’s projects, Newbrough said his office is hoping to get them built within the next year.