The Benton Township Board of Trustees has approved a project to demolish an underground water reservoir on Paw Paw Avenue.

Township Trustees this week approved a $446,000 contract with B&Z Construction for the work using leftover federal ARPA funds. Steve Oosting of engineering firm Prein and Newhof told us this will remove old infrastructure that’s no longer needed.

“It’s an underground water storage reservoir,” Oosting said. “It holds one million gallons of water, and there’s a pumping station there that will pump that water into the distribution system as a source of water supply to augment the supply that comes from the Lake Michigan water intake. So it provides storage.”

Oosting said the ongoing project to construct a couple of new water towers in the township will render this underground reservoir obsolete. The demolition will be done this year as the federal funding will expire in September.

The township doesn’t yet have any plans for what to do with the property on Paw Paw Avenue once the project is complete.