REMERTON — The Remerton City Council selected two separate engineering firms during its regular meeting Thursday to assist with existing and future plan developments as well as city enhancements.

Remerton continues to expand with new residents and businesses.

Council recently requested that the city look to secure an engineering firm that would be able to assist in further building the city over upcoming years.

With the exception of Councilman Scooter Hines, Council voted 3-to-1 to select ASA Engineering and Surveying Inc. of Valdosta over CDM Engineering Firm of Atlanta in an effort to keep services local.

“I think that CDM is a great engineering firm, but I also think we need someone with an established local presence, who we know will be here the next 20 years, or else we’ll be in the same predicament we’ve been in before,” said Councilman Richard Miller.

Now that ASA has been selected as the city’s engineering firm, the Council anticipates getting into gear with some long-awaited projects. ASA will provide water, sewer and civil engineering design services, as well as technical assistance.

Genesis Engineering and Constructors Corporation of Tallahassee, Fla., was also selected by the Council to provide design services specifically for the City’s Transportation Enhancement (TE) Grant Development. As the city looks to create sidewalks, walking trails and other landscaping enhancements, Council members selected The Genesis Corporation, which has completed work on Valdosta’s Azalea City Trails.

Engineering services provided to the city will be paid through TE Grant funds, according to McDougal.

Following the conversion to a new water rate system, the city will began looking into providing a rollback of sewer charges for utility customers who use water for irrigation purposes but do not use the sewer for disposal of such usage.

“When we changed the water rates, one individual said that he waters his lawn, but he had questions about why he needed to pay sewer charges if the water wasn’t actually being disposed of,” said City Manager Brian McDougal.

“Right now, we’re in the process of looking into this, and we hope to have the research complete next month and look to bring back any recommendations during our next meeting. As far as the water rate change goes, we’ve had a few issues, but not anything major. Truly, if customers will conserve water, they will see their bills going down. Although we’re not under any orders to conserve water, the EPD (Environmental Protection Division) is encouraging municipalities to conserve water by converting to the REU (Residential Equivalent Unit) System that we’ve adopted, so we’re actually moving ahead of the curve.”

Council also voted to deny placing centralized mailboxes within the city. The recommendation was meant to remedy the ongoing problem of mailboxes being vandalized. Several Council members said that residents they have spoken to throughout the week were not in favor of centralized boxes.