Water bill hikes lowered
BUCYRUS - City residents are about to get a little holiday cheer in the mail, depending on how they define cheer.
The city announced earlier this year that residents would see a 20 percent increase in their monthly water bills next year to pay for construction of the city's new water plant, now under way at 3467 Beechgrove Road, just south of Ohio 98 on the north side of town.
That hasn't changed, but the amount of the increase has; it's fallen to just 5 percent, because of lower costs for both construction and financing.
"Our administration will be taking a hard look at future rate increases that are planned for 2017 and 2018 in order to see if those rate increases can also be reduced," Mayor Jeff Reser and city service-safety director Jeff Wagner wrote in a letter that's being attached to December utility bills going out to residents.
"Please be assured that our administration is aware of the burden that rate increases can cause to our residents, especially those on a fixed income, and we work hard to make sure that our water-usage rates are as low as possible," they wrote.
The new water treatment plant, only the third in the city's history, is costing $24.4 million and is scheduled to be finished in about a year and a half. The city's first water plant, built in 1883, lasted until the World War II era. The current plant, which was designed to have a useful life of 50 years, was built in 1950.
"The contracts were signed below engineer's estimates (by $4.2 million), and we will also save a substantial sum of money due to our near-perfect timing on our interest rates (1.57 percent over 20 years)," Reser said.
The construction is occurring in two phases, with Danis Industries Construction Co., of Miamisburg, handling the first phase at a cost of $22.2 million. Underground Utilities Inc., of Monroeville, will handle the second phase for $2.2 million.
The loan, from the state Water Supply Revolving Loan Account, will allow for the construction of new water transmission mains, a force main, 24-inch raw water pipe conversion, coupled with removal of the existing lime sludge lagoons and demolition of the current water treatment plant on Water Street.
The new water facility will be a no-frills, highly automated plant. The city will build a new water line under U.S. 30 to the plant, after which it will clean the existing raw water line. It will then have two water lines going into the city.
The plant is being built adjacent to Outhwaite Reservoir, which was constructed in the early 1980s after the city failed to land a new business - an Anheuser-Busch brewery that wound up locating on the north side of Columbus - because of a water supply judged to be inadequate at the time. The city is now sitting on a billion gallons of water on any given day.
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