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Washington town council plows ahead with wastewater project
After an often contentious two-hour special meeting with more than 60 property owners and residents who came prepared with notebooks and facts, the Washington Town Council voted unanimously to proceed with the wastewater project and to authorize the town's engineering firm to give notice to proceed to the contractors.Saying, "We need the sewer, the time has come, the time is now," council member John Sullivan told the crowd it was time for the town to reconfirm its commitment to the project to a mostly happy audience.
Construction of the project will begin in January.
There were those who still thought the project was just too expensive for the town, and that the project should at least be delayed while other less expensive alternatives were pursued.
Sullivan took the lead in explaining a new finance model that would spread out payments for four to six years of the initial hook up fees. Those fees had also been altered and new categories laid out for different types of users.
They were: Residential, government, commercial (non-residential excluding restaurants), and restaurants.
Different peak use factors – numbers used to multiply peak use to estimate high volume wastewater flow – were also altered in that there was no longer a multiplier for residential users. All residential users would be assessed one Environmental Discharge Unit (EDU), commercial and government would use the original 1.4 multiplier but the new category of restaurants would use a 1.7 multiplier.
All these are just different ways of splitting the same bill, which in the end is the same $4 million loan the town is committed to paying off beginning in May of 2010.
The biggest winner this round is the Inn which had got the council – in private discussion among David Fiske, the Inn's attorney, Mayor Eugene Leggett, Sullivan and town attorney John Bennett – to take into account that its water usage was significantly higher than their discharge of wastewater and therefore to reassess the total EDUs assigned to the Inn.
But wherever you squeeze this model for money, somewhere else it will have to pop up, and Sullivan acknowledged on more than one occasion that past 10 years out, no one really knows what would happen.
It all depends on growth of wastewater users in the town beyond the existing projected users already included in the model. As Sullivan put it, "no growth, there will be trouble, some growth everything will be okay, lots of growth and the system will make money," said Sullivan.
There's the balance that the project is looking for essentially, said Sullivan. It all hinges on growth projections.
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