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Deputy Town Manager Roe O’Donnell led
off a discussion about water
conservation measures Tuesday afternoon
by taking the town commissioners and
mayor through a series of possible
problems – times when demand for water
and/or sewer exceeds what is available
under the merger contract with the City
of Raleigh.
That led to a discussion
about the merger and when Town of Wake
Forest water customers will see their
rates reduced to Raleigh’s.
“The question I get is: when
is my bill going to go down?”
Commissioner Frank Drake said.
Lower water and sewer rates
and not having to pay the high cost of a
new water source and upgraded water
system were the two reasons the
commissioners chose merger, which went
into effect July 1 of 2005.
“Our collections have been
ahead of schedule,” Mayor Vivian Jones
said. When it was signed, the agreement
anticipated it would take the town seven
years to pay off the merger costs using
the difference between the Wake Forest
and Raleigh rates and the payments for
water tap-ons and other permits.
The question is what will
the town have to repay?
The agreement was for an
estimated $15 million in improvements to
the water and sewer systems plus $3
million for an additional 1 million
gallons of daily capacity at the Raleigh
water plant and $710,000 for 200,000
additional gallons of capacity at the
city’s wastewater treatment plant for
wastewater in the Richland Creek
collection basin.
The total is $18.8 million,
but that does not account for any
increased – or decreased – construction
costs.
The largest part of the
system improvements – an estimated $3.6
million – was to upgrade the town’s
wastewater plant on Smith Creek from
2.4 to 3.2 million gallons a day.
That is a very complicated
process, O’Donnell said. “This re-rating
they’re doing is every bit as
complicated as the original design.”
“Within a year we should
know” the actual cost? Jones asked.
“Yes,” O’Donnell said.
Some of the projects have
come in at less cost than anticipated,
he said.
“The big unknown is how fast
do we grow and what the costs are going
to be. We can predict a little more what
the growth is going to be,” O’Donnell
said.
The town board has agreed
that growth at about 800 new homes a
year will help to pay off the $18.8
million faster.
O’Donnell said that the town
might have to purchase another
half-million gallons of water capacity
about 2010 and another 50,000 gallons of
sewer capacity for the Richland Creek
basin in 2009. Raleigh will have to have
the design underway to increase the
Smith Creek sewer main by 2013. |
