Petersburgh Applies For Megabucks For Water System Improvements

by Alex Brooks
The Petersburgh Town Board held a workshop meeting on Thursday June 16 to discuss making an application for a grant to do work on the Water District. The Town’s consultants. Rich Straut and Don Fletcher from Barton & Loguidice were there to present their recommendations, along with Water District Superintendent Ben Krahforst.[private]
Don Fletcher said there were several options included in the grant application. The first is a general refurbishing of the Water District that his firm had been working on before the PFOA problem arose, involving replacing valves, cleaning and refurbishing the tank, replacing controls and chlorination equipment, re-drilling wells, replacing water meters, and the like. This work was estimated at $400,000 for general repairs and $800,000 to $900,000 to drill new wells, for a total of $1.2 to $1.3 million.
The other two options were aimed at finding an alternative source of water for Petersburgh that is free of PFOA, and both options carried astronomical price tags.
One was to drill new wells in Petersburgh. The problem is that in order to drill the new wells in an area far enough away from the Taconic plant to be free of PFOA, they have to be quite a long distance from the Water District members, and burying the water mains over that distance is very expensive. The engineers at B&L did a “desk survey” of the water regime in the area, and identified two possible areas, both near Route 22, where they would expect to find clean and plentiful water. One was north on Rosenburg flats near Church Hollow Road, and the other was south at the Berlin line – in fact, most of that area was in the Town of Berlin. Fletcher said his firm’s estimate to carry out that option was $7 million. Both areas were somewhat problematic – the northern area near Church Hollow because it is downstream of the Taconic plant and might become contaminated with PFOA in the future as the plume moves downstream, and the southern area because most of it is in Berlin.
The other option was to connect Petersburgh to the Troy water supply.  The closest place that the Troy water goes to now is in the neighborhood of the Valente quarry on Route 2 on the Western edge of Grafton. Fletcher said they did not even estimate the cost of running a water main all the way to there, but they estimated the cost to run a water main to Route 2 and Babcock Lake Road, in case the plan to solve Hoosick Falls’ water problem involved running a new water main out Route 2 and along Babcock Lake Road to Hoosick Falls. The estimate to run a water main to Babcock Lake Road was $9 million.
The report presented by Fletcher did not recommend or estimate the cost of expanding the Petersburgh Water District to serve homes with contaminated wells along Route 22, but if a new well was drilled at either of the proposed new well sites on Route 22, the new water main needed to deliver the water would go by those areas anyway.
One of the State funding programs they are applying for had a deadline of June 20, so the application had to be authorized and finished within days. That program has a maximum project size of $5 million, and it will make grants for only 60% of the cost, so the maximum grant would be $3 million.  Fletcher said there is another state program that could grant up to $2 million, so there is a possibility of getting $5 million.
As unlikely as all of this sounds, the Board passed a SEQR resolution and authorized the Supervisor to sign grant applications for funding for water system improvements. Fletcher said the moment may be right for the State to provide a lot of money to solve the PFOA crisis, and submitting an application can get the conversation started. Some combination of grants and money provided by Taconic under the Superfund Consent Order may get together enough funding to do one of these projects, he concluded.[/private]