Henderson officials are juggling plans to spend tens of millions of dollars on utility infrastructure in the next five years, but a 24-inch valve is the immediate sticking point in the water system.
Assistant City Manager Mark Warren brought the valve problem to the attention of the City Council’s Public Utilities Committee on Tuesday afternoon and discussed it during an interview Wednesday.
The $10,000 valve is at the Tar River on the pipeline that carries Henderson water to Franklin County. Its malfunction has no direct effect on water customers in Vance County, and it’s hardly a major expense when the Kerr Lake Regional Water System hopes to move ahead with a $21 million expansion next month. But the faulty valve is a reminder that all of the engineering studies and strategic plans and use projections can’t prevent the unexpected from bedeviling massive utility systems.
The valve controls the flow of water from the city’s Kerr Lake allotment to Franklin County. Warren said the main purpose is to reduce or cut off the flow to prevent the water tanks in Henderson from dropping too low during emergencies, such as a fire that requires hours of water spraying.
About a week ago the valve malfunctioned and started closing without reason, Warren said. No one knows why the part went bad.
“The experts have never seen anything like it,” Warren said.
He said crews will make a temporary fix before the Memorial Day weekend by adjusting the computerized system that controls the water flow. They’ll make a permanent repair next week.
If the problem proves to be a defect in the valve, Warren said, the vendor will give Henderson a credit toward the purchase of the replacement.
The valve is only 5 years old, so it was a shock when it failed. The problem comes while city officials are focusing on upgrading or replacing 30-year-old plants for more than $20 million each.
Those major utility projects were the focus of Tuesday’s Public Utilities Committee meeting.
That committee, chaired by John Wester, has asked the City Council to endorse the expansion of the regional water plant from a capacity of about 13 million gallons per day to 20 million gallons per day to meet projected increases in demand over the next 25 years.
Wester and former water plant director Mike Hicks, who is working under contract to see the expansion through, want Henderson to fulfill its role as managing partner of the water system by leading the way in supporting the project. The Kerr Lake Regional Water System’s partners — Henderson, Oxford and Warren County — are meeting June 15 and want to give consulting engineer Dean Ramsey the go-ahead to bid out the project.
The water system has spent $1 million from the regional reserve fund to cover planning for the expansion. That money would be included in the $21 million final price and in the financing for the expansion. If the expansion is blocked or slowed, the water system will have to borrow $1 million to replenish that reserve, Warren said.
Standing in the way of the expansion’s approval, as much as any one council member can, is Elissa Yount. Tuesday’s meeting was largely meant as an opportunity to address her questions and persuade her to back the water project.
To Wester, the need for the $21 million expansion is obvious. Although the loss of major customers such as Harriet & Henderson Yarns, Americal, J.P. Taylor and Lenox has reduced regional water sales in the past couple of years, the average daily demand on the system is projected to exceed its capacity by 2015, and peak demand will strain capacity by 2010. In addition, economic development officials are hopeful that the regional hub will bring in manufacturers and boost water use and sales.
Construction on the expansion would take three years, so if the projections are accurate, the water system has no more than two years to start the work. Otherwise, the possibility exists that an industrial prospect could reject a move to this area because of uncertainty about water availability.
Yount does not question the need for an expansion. She does question whether it should be started now, when water demand is down, and whether it should be the city’s priority. Instead, she sees the 30-year-old sewer plant as the more immediate need.
A study completed in October 2002 concluded that Henderson had to replace its Water Reclamation Facility within 10 years because plant flows already were at 80 percent of capacity when it rained. That same consultant study found that the water plant’s capacity would not be exhausted for years after the sewage treatment plant was tapped out. Those projections have not been adjusted to account for a decline in sewage customers after the closing of Henderson’s big textile plants.
Another problem for the treatment plant is its use of expensive, outdated chemical processes that plant director Tom Spain has struggled to keep running.
The 2002 study recommended a two-phase replacement of the treatment plant at a total cost of $22.4 million. Warren said those figures have not been updated during a period of rapidly rising construction costs. For example, the water plant’s expansion has increased in price from $15 million to $21 million in three years.
Warren said he and Spain will go through the 2002 study to pick out the most critical elements for replacement over the next five years and estimate the expense. From there, the city can plan how to pay for its sewer needs.
It’s the financial element that bothers Yount, she said Wednesday. The water plant has an excellent plan, and the sewer plant has an excellent plan. But she has seen no plan for how the city will pay for those plans.
“John Wester asked me directly what it would take for me to support” the water plant expansion, Yount said Wednesday. “I said a strategic, long-range plan that laid out all the costs and projected the way to pay, and a public hearing would be essential before I could make an intelligent judgment call.”
The financial questions are complicated because they apply differently to the city and its residents. The fact that the water system is a regional operation, with Henderson owning 60 percent and operating as the managing partner, adds further difficulties.
Both the water fund and the sewer fund are enterprises that are separate from Henderson’s general fund. Those enterprise funds are supposed to break even or make money on the strength of their own revenues and not touch the taxes that run the city. From that perspective, decisions on the regional water plant should not be affected by the city sewage plant. That’s how Wester looks at the project.
But from a city taxpayer’s perspective, the distinctions aren’t important. Regardless of how the city divides the monthly “water bill,” which covers sewage and sanitation as well as water, residents pay that bill out of the same money that pays property taxes. They’re all just the expenses.
The water plant works in large part because of the demand for water from customers that aren’t partners, most notably Franklin County. Ramsey’s presentations on the expansion show that the key to the project is increase sales: The more water the system can sell, the smaller the impact of the expansion on water prices. If the water system can sell 11,634,000 gallons per day in 2007-08, it won’t have to increase rates to pay for the expansion; current projections call for average sales of 7,920,000 gallons per day in 2007.
The possibility of increased sales will increase if the state grants the water system the right to increase its interbasin transfers, or piping of water from the Roanoke River Basin into the Tar-Pamlico and Neuse basins. Yount is hesitant to move ahead on the expansion without final word on the IBT proposal.
If the creation of more capacity isn’t met by more demand, the average water bill would increase by up to $3.34 per month, or $40 per year, to pay for the expansion. Water customers could take an additional hit if and when the Army Corps of Engineers and the city reach an agreement on the continued use of Kerr Lake water — another unknown Yount would like to resolve before supporting an expansion.
The monthly increase to cover the sewer plant could be more severe for the simple reason that fewer customers will share the expense. The city has fewer sewer customers, no regional partners and no prospects for selling wastewater treatment capacity to outside jurisdictions. Even Vance County, which is moving toward a county water system using Henderson water, has shown no interest in tapping into Henderson’s sewer system countywide, Warren said.
So while the water plant expansion has no direct connection to the sewer plant, the projects converge in the bills Hendersonians pay.
There was no sign that the views of Wester and Yount converged Tuesday.
Warren said both council members have concerns, and he can see both sides. But sooner or later, both projects will be necessary.