Posted: Saturday, June 27, 2009 12:00 am
Clean water is not cheap, in case you didn't notice. This was brought home to me the other day in reporting on a pending 9 percent sewer rate hike in
Albany.
How come such a big increase at a time when the economy is down, wages are frozen or gone, and the city council itself had decided against raising the retail price of water?
The answer lies at the north end of Davidson Street, in the big expansion of the wastewater treatment plant a contractor for the city is just about to complete.
Albany has been borrowing money to pay for this project. Next year it faces a $4.5 million balloon interest payment, and after that it owes the state $5 million a year for the next 20 years. That's more than $100 million all together, in case you lost count.
Did Albany have a choice about the treatment plant? Not really.
For one thing, when the decision had to be made, early this decade, the city had been growing. The old plant was sometimes unable to cope, especially in the winter during heavy rains.
The federal Clean Water Act, as administered in Oregon by the DEQ, required that action be taken to upgrade the plant, and the loans to pay for it were made available by the state.
Above all, there is nothing wrong with the notion of cleaning up the Willamette River to the greatest extent feasible.
When you drift down the river in an inner tube, you want the water to be pretty much pristine. At Takena Park the other day, I had a mishap with my canoe. It filled with water and I got dunked and got a mouthful of Willamette River.
I didn't think about it at the time, being too busy recovering stuff that was floating away. But afterwards I was grateful for whatever wastewater treatment plant improvements have been made - at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars - in Eugene and Corvallis.
The $100 million I just mentioned is the total over 20 years for the treatment plant alone. One hundred million is a nice round number in a different context too.
In 2006, Albany in cooperation with Millersburg completed a $30 million water filtration plant off Scravel Hill. It takes water from the Santiam River just downstream from where the North and South Santiam join.
Together with the wastewater project then getting under way, as City Manager Wes Hare sometimes points out, Albany was committing itself to roughly $100 million in expenses for new public works, pretty much all at the same time.
None of that expense is covered by taxes. All of it is supposed to come from the customers.
For the water project, the city sold revenue bonds to be repaid from the monthly bills water customers pay.
That was one reason the Gatorade factory would have been a big help. If some giant water user came along and paid a giant monthly bill, the pressure on residential customers would be that much less.