The Monmouth City Council this week approved an engineering agreement for a planned upgrade of the city's water infrastructure that circumvents the Public Square. Water mains that feed the businesses on the square are over 100-years-old and are too small and don't supply adequate pressure for buildings to have a fire sprinkler system installed. City Administrator Lew Steinbrecher says that a Request for Qualifications was made from six different firms with two responding. Woodard and Curran was chosen because of their familiarity with the city's infrastructure. "It was clear, based on their history and familiarity with our water system, that I recommended that we continue to use Woodard and Curran for our water engineering needs and they concurred," said Steinbrecher in a Tuesday interview. He says the city is paying for the work with $1.2 million from the American Rescue Plan Act. "When we got that allocation we decided that we needed to replace the water main around the public square. That needed to be done before we could do the streetscape and beautification work in the public square." The firm will start working on the design, seek approval of the design from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, then prep bid specifications with the hope of breaking ground by next spring.