Cloverdale making strides in fixing its I&I problem

Thursday, July 10, 2014

CLOVERDALE -- The Cloverdale Town Council met for its monthly meeting on Tuesday evening as it continued discussions on several topics in hopes of improving the town.

The meeting, which lasted four hours, started off with three public hearings for the purchase or leasing of water hose meters, amending wastewater rates and vacating an alley located at 151 Robert Weist.

As previously discussed, the town had agreed to purchase four new water hose meters, which will be available for town residents to purchase for $123.49 or rent for a $50 deposit with a charge of $1 per day with a maximum rental of seven days.

"You can rent it for seven days and then you have to return it," council member Gary Bennington said. "Why would anyone want to spend a $50 deposit for a seven day rental for a water hose meter at $1 a day too? If I was going to rent one, I'd rent it for the summer."

With the majority of the council members agreeing that the seven-day maximum rental period was needed due to the low amount of meters purchased by the town, the Ordinance 2014-19 passed with Bennington voting against.

The council unanimously passed Ordinance-21014 amending the wastewater rates along with Ordinance 2014-20, which involves vacating an alley between two plots of land owned by the same person.

With the public hearings out of the way, the council moved on to its regular meeting. Clerk-treasurer Cheryl Galloway started the meeting off, coming to the board to seek approval to hire Curry and Associates to compile a report of the town's I&I problems.

"Curry thinks that we need to hire them for the engineering to go forward to find out where our I&I problems are," Galloway explained. "The preliminary engineering report says that they'll charge us $30,000."

Galloway went on to add that the work will likely be done over a six-month period and will be done on an hourly basis to not exceed $30,000.

"What she's going to do is take all the data that we have from the smoke testing, the dye testing and the TV camera that we have, she's going to compile that into a report," Superintendent of Public Works Chuck Knuff stated. "Then, the next step she will put a cost to all this stuff for the agreed order with the state and then we'll have to come up with a series of steps and the dollar figure connected to it to fix all this. We need to go forward with this. 100 percent."

Although, Vice President Dennis Padgett was a bit hesitant on the hiring of Curry and Associates without having 100 percent of the data ready for the reporting process to begin, the council approved to move forward with the report in hopes of finally moving in the direction of resolving the I&I issues once and for all.

"This is a situation that really needs to be addressed. This has been going on for 5, 6, 7 years," Padgett said. "We've got a 70 year old system that's broke down everywhere. I just don't want to jump the gun until we get all of our stuff."

Previously, the town signed an agreement with IDEM that creates a schedule of items that need to be done by a certain time period in hopes of alleviating the I&I issues. The town also agreed to participate in the operator assistance program with IDEM, during which Dave Dennman of IDEM periodically visits Cloverdale to monitor its progress.

"Your last project identified that your plant would be able to handle 2.5 million gallons of flow. It does not. In fact, you have more water coming in than that. You want to have everything ready to give to her to do, but she won't need everything to begin," Dennman said. "We're going to try to do what I think all of the small communities throughout the state need to do, which is before they spend any more money in building their plant, they need to fix those parts of their system."

Dennman went on to note that obtaining every piece of information is not important at this time, but creating such a report will help identify where the town is lacking and what its issues are.

"There's progress being made," Dennman said. "You don't want to repeat missing the boat on fixing problems and we're going to be working on that more. IDEM needs to kept informed."

Knuff also came before the council to discuss the ongoing sewer issues with several houses around Doe Creek.

Previously, Knuff had come before the council to advise that nearly 300 feet of sewer line needed to be replaced as it had more than 20 breaks in it.

"We didn't dig it up because we knew the lines were shot," Knuff said. "There was no sense in it. The whole sewer line is shot."

As of now, the utilities department has helped alleviate the pressure of the sewer line by creating a manhole. However, Knuff received approval from the council to move forward with the bid process for the installation of the new sewer lines along with three manholes. The project is estimated to cost $50,000. The new line, which will be eight inches, will be gravity fed to the Doe Creek Lift Station.

"You need to know what it's going to cost and that's what this (the bid process) will do," Town Attorney Allan Yackey said. "When you get that information you need to put together a meeting with all of these property owners to sit down with them and explain it to them what the town needs to solve the problem. Ideally, they will agree to provide the easements. Ultimately, there's legal recourse to solve this problem. It's just a mess."

Knuff will present the council with more information on cost and the status of the easements on the properties during its August meeting.

In other business:

* The town approved the Resolution 2014-6, the restructuring of the 2007 bond. Redevelopment Commission President Wayne Galloway came before the council to advise that First National Bank was going to restructure the bond to $380,000 over a 20 year period with 4 percent interest.

* The council approved for Cassida to begin commercial building inspections as he has received several complaints of empty fire extinguishers, windows that don't lock, wiring issues, among other problems.

* The council approved Ordinance 2014-17 requiring inspection of sewage works, which includes a $25 for certificate of inspection. Cassida will issue inspections upon the change in ownership of every residential lot, parcel of real estate or building that discharges sanitary waste into the sewer system. Said property must be inspected for proper sanitary sewer connection, inflow and infiltration prior to receiving water service.

* Steve Brock came before the council to present a water rate study. Brock informed the council that the current water rates and charges are adequate for the next 3-5 years and would not recommend changing the rates.

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  • Wonder why the building inspector is overseeing the inspection of sewage works? Wouldn't the utility employees normally do this? They turn the water on and off. They fix the breaks.

    Worse, are we now the only community in Putnam Co. to assess this fee? The property owner is charged by the utility company to see if their equipment works?

    -- Posted by letspulltogether on Thu, Jul 10, 2014, at 7:21 PM
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