The West Salem Village Board last week approved a $49,000 infrastructure investment that will keep village water and sewer systems functioning properly into the future.

Foregoing the customary bidding processing and calling the need “an emergency situation,” the board awarded a contract to L.W. Allen Inc. for $48,802, with the possible need for an additional ground study costing $2,940.

The contract calls for placing radio towers at 10 locations in the village: the three wells, two reservoirs, four lift stations and the wastewater treatment plant.

The radio-based system will replace an existing telephone-based system that has become error-prone since Centurylink began upgrading phone lines last year from analog to digital, or copper wire to fiber-optic wire.

“We had an impossible situation where none of our stations were responding,” said Village Administrator Teresa Schnitzler of the upgraded phone lines. “It didn’t work with our system.”

The West Salem Village Board’s Public Works Committee members were apprised of the direness of the situation one week prior to last week’s special meeting of the full board.

The vote to approve the contract was passed unanimously, and the motion to do so was made by Trustee J. Terry Hanson.

A complex control system, the village’s SCADA, or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, allows a computer terminal (in West Salem’s case based at the wastewater treatment plant) to send signals to other locations to monitor and control their function.

If the system detects a problem, it automatically begins calling the five or six preprogrammed phone numbers of people assigned to fix it.

Failures in the existing system have recently resulted in a number of false positives, a number that has “grown exponentially,” since the village brought the new water tower online in December.

Officials hope using radio waves instead of phone lines will resolve the problem and prevent possible damage from occurring to either the system or individual properties.

Board members decided last week that because half the sites are sewer-related, the sewer utility will pay half the bill and the other half will be covered under remaining funds for ongoing water projects.

There will be no additional costs to West Salem taxpayers, officials said.