by Alex Brooks
Engineers from MRB Engineering came to both the Hoosick Town Board Meeting on August 8 and the Village of Hoosick Falls Meeting the next night to report on the status of their project designing an expansion plan for the Village Water System.[private]
Project managers Richard DeGuida and Michelle Baines have been working on the project for six or seven weeks. They held a work session with Village, Town, and State officials on August 2 to present the data and maps they have put together. At that meeting there were 23 proposed new areas where water service might be provided, and five were eliminated, so the map presented this week showed 18 possible new service areas. Thirteen of them could be served by just extending the pipes, but five of them would require additional water infrastructure such as a new pumping station or a new tank. In addition, the project is aiming to fix deficiencies in some of the existing parts of the water system.
No total was provided for what it would cost to provide service to all 18 service areas and also upgrade the parts of the existing system that need it, because that would be a project too big to take on all at once. Instead, the strategy is to prioritize the most important projects and formulate a project that could be funded and undertaken in the near-term.
MRB is aiming to have a draft of its full engineering report ready by August 22 to present to the Town and Village for their review, then hold a formal meeting August 29 to review the report, so that an application can be submitted to the State Environmental Facilities Corporation by the end of August. Baines said the maximum grant from that program would be $3 million or 60% of the project cost. So if they designed a $5 million project and $3 million was covered by an EFC grant, they could then go to the Governor’s office to try to get the remainder of the project cost. The Governor’s office has expressed interest in funding a part of the project.
The highest priority projects will probably be to extend the lines north and south on Route 22 and to replace deficient parts of the existing system, but there are many add-on projects that might be undertaken later. The first service area running south on Route 22 extends to the Central School. A second service area extends further south to Hoosac School and to the Stewart’s Shop on Route 7. There are also offshoot service areas to Lester Lane, Bovie Hill, and two to Wilson Hill. There are two proposed service areas to Clay Hill, two to the Johnson Hill area and one to Faribanks Road, and a number of branches off the northern extension, including two east on Route 67 and three west on Route 67, as well as a large service area in the Hamlet of Buskirk.
Mayor Borge called the full map a “five or ten year planning document,” since the initial phase will probably only serve three or four of the 18 service areas shown on the map.
Rich DeGuida said MRB will be producing two reports, one on water line extension, and the other on sewer line extension, but the sewer line extension will only go South on Route 22 to the Central School.
He also said the EFC will want to see the existing Inter-Municipal agreement that allows residents of the Town to be served by the Village water system. He wasn’t sure if they would accept that, or if a new water District would need to be set up. [/private]