At a July 12 hearing on water quality in the Rockdale City Council chamber, questions turned away from the hearing topic to the high price of water service in the city.
City officials addressed the questions matter-of-factly.
The pipes in the city are old, very old. They should have been taken care of years ago, officials said. There are 26 miles of cast iron pipes and 5 miles of asbestos cement pipes that have outlived their usefulness.
Now city water customers have to pay to have all those water lines in the city replaced, and that work to replace the miles of water lines is not scheduled to start until 2023 with a projected completion date of May 2025.
In 2018, the basic water rate for this year were predicted to rise to around $170, City Manager Barbara Holly said.
Right now the city staff is keeping the rate as low as possible while making the payments on the loans of around $60 million that it is going to take to replace all the current lines that aren’t PVC.
In fact, at the April council meeting Holly said Public Works Director Jerald Brunson came up with a plan that will allow the city to replace the aging pipes at the water facility instead of having to rebuild the structure as city leaders thought they were going to have to make provisions for in the upcoming budget.
Brunson’s plan will extend the lifespan of the water treatment plant by eight to 10 years, Holly said.
The cost will be about $300,000 and $200,000 of that will come from a grant the city is going to receive from the Post Oak Savannah Groundwater Conservation District.
“This means that the next wave of debt needed to rebuild the facility (around $16M) can be put off. The time frame for new debt can more closely coincide with a big debt chunk being retired in early 2030,” Holly said.
“The longer we can push things out in time and the less we can get it to cost, then the more we are saving the rate payers,” she said in a later interview.
The initial rate increase for the long-term project was approved by the City Council in February 2019.
The earlier rate study pegged this year’s (2019) increase for the “average” customer from the current $73.84 to $106.69. An increase to $177.63 in 2023 is part of the study’s estimate.
That huge jump was negated by Brunson and city staffers’ work.
Had the city not acted when it did, water utility customers would still have faced rate increases down the road, former City Manager Chris Whittaker said in 2019. The “patch and fix” method was no longer feasible.
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