CANDIA — Selectmen hope to decide tonight on a plan to close the old town incinerator site, remove a pair of old buildings and rehabilitate land that has become a chronic headache for the town.

Residents and town officials have been mulling different aspects of a plan to clean up a section of the roughly 7-acre landfill and recycling center, where the town operated an incinerator and burning pit from the mid '70s through 2008.

The major hurdle is money.

Candia has $35,000 set aside for the project, for which the lowest bid came in at nearly $130,000.

“We are obviously looking at the best way we can do it at the lowest cost,” said Joe Duarte, selectmen chair. “We want to get it cleaned up now, because it's not going to get any easier, or any less expensive.”

Town officials had been looking at a plan proposed by board member Amanda Soares, which involved capping the ash pit, moving one of the buildings to the cemetery and allowing whoever removed the second building to sell it as scrap.

“It was a very basic plan,” said Soares, who added that what she proposed would have cost about $35,000. “We just wanted to get the closure done.”

Although Soares had a good number of people on board with her proposal, which she said was approved by the state Department of Environmental Services, it did not involve testing the ash pit for any pollutants or toxic waste.

Soares said the ash pit was believed to be from a burning ground where residents could dispose of brush and clean wood, and state regulations did not require any testing for that.

However, other town officials suspected that ash from the town incinerator, which burned all types of waste, had been dumped in the pit.

Tests were done, traces of heavy metals were found and the project expanded to include clean-up and ash disposal.

Selectman Richard Snow said that simply capping the ash pit would have risked that some toxins eventually could leech into nearby wells. So far, regular monitoring of well water has shown no evidence of pollutants.

Snow, who also serves on the Cemetery Commission, said that while recycling one of the buildings from the incinerator site was a good idea, the old metal building was not a good fit for the cemetery.

“If we put something up, I would like it to be a chapel,” he said.

The town is looking at three bids for the project: Epping-based EnviroVantage, which bid $129,300 to clean up the site; GZA Geoenvironmentalists, which bid $336,588 and Francesco which proposed doing the work for $336,700.

Snow said representatives from EnviroVantage were at the last selectmen's meeting, which gave him a chance to ask about the wide gap in the bids.

“They said they did their homework,” Snow said. “They looked at the site, and in their minds, that's what they understood it would take to do the work.”

Duarte said the board will probably look at the option of doing the clean-up in phases. The town has enough money to move forward with digging out the ash, disposing of it and taking down the buildings.

The next step, which would probably wait until next year, would be covering the site with a layer of loam and planting grass.

btaormina@newstote.com