Baldwin City Council voted Monday to press ahead with plans to rebuild their waste water treatment plant at an estimated cost around $8 million. They approved sending in an application to the US Department of Agriculture seeking federal funding to cover 75% of the project’s pricetag.
“We’re just moving forward with the application,” Mayor Jerry Neace explains. “At any time we can pull back out of it. But we need to see if we’re going to be able to get the 75% match and this is the only way that we can find out.”
As Now Habersham reported first back in June, There is no doubt among leaders that the treatment plant must be fixed. It was originally built in the 1970s. They did an upgrade in 2003 but the piece that is supposed to filter equipment-damaging debris from entering the plant, the “headworks,” never worked properly. Engineers say, over the past decade, every pipe and piece of equipment they have was damaged by the debris-laden water coming into the plant.
There’s also a problem with the size of the lines. The prison in Alto is the city’s largest customer and the Department of Corrections wanted an upgrade at the plant to process 800,000 gallons a day. They did that but the pipes leading to the plant can’t actually handle that much. According to a 2011 report from former Supervisor Chad Conard, “The plant is supposed to handle 800,000 gallons a day but when it gets to 600,000 gallons everything begins to overflow and operators go into emergency measures.” The same report states that the facility’s wiring is also a mess.
All these problems mean high annual operations and maintenance costs. Baldwin paid $641,907 just to keep the plant up and running during this year.
The $8 million plan would replace almost everything at the current plant. It promises to correct all the mistakes of the past and fully update the plant beyond current state environmental requirements. Leaders estimate it will make the whole operation more efficient which would lower the cost of running the plant by a considerable amount.
While the USDA has a sizable amount of funds available for towns like Baldwin, they usually don’t provide 75% on a project this big. Mayor Neace is hoping the agency will make an exception, “Once they review the application they can tell us if they’ll give us $4 million or $6 million. We’re hoping for $6 million since that would be 75% of the total cost.”
The application will go to the feds this week. There is no way to know when they’ll respond, “Once it goes to USDA we’re at the mercy of their bureaucracy,” Neace says.
