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Fredonia wary of interconnect impact

Chautauqua County officials feel it is in the village of Fredonia’s best interests to build a water interconnect with the city of Dunkirk, but village board members aren’t completely sold on its urgency.

County Executive Vince Horrigan and other county representatives attended Tuesday’s village board workshop to talk water with the mayor and trustees. Horrigan told them it clearly makes more sense for the village to stay in the water business rather than join the regional water district and spend more than $7.3 million to decommission its high-hazard dam.

“You should build the interconnect,” he added. “You need water storage, and that is what Fredonia needs — water storage right now. The interconnect is $2.7 million. The district will fund $500,000 of it. So, the $2.7 million interconnect from the Dunkirk water supply to Fredonia will provide the storage you need, will provide all the flexibility you need for future actions, and $500,000 of that will be funded by the district … through grant funding. It (the interconnect) gives you a redundant water supply and it gives you relief from, really, ever having to put more money into that reservoir in terms of dredging, which could be significant.”

A needs assessment by the county Health Department determined Fredonia has inadequate storage, meaning if the water treatment plant encountered an unexpected crisis, a boil water order would be necessary, as it was a number of years ago when there were problems in the upflow clarifiers.

Paul Snyder, an engineer with the Health Department, stated some critical work on the plant’s upflow clarifiers cannot be executed without adequate storage to safely take the plant offline during such work.

“If those clarifiers break, the water that the village produces will not meet state standards and you will have a boil-water order on your hands again, or worse,” he warned.

Mayor Athanasia Landis pointed out the village is in the process of working with the engineering firm O’Brien & Gere to put together a schedule for its water needs and what projects it should tackle first before moving on to others. She added the village must fix the dam and its spillway, which would cost $5.3 million.

“I don’t know since when was the last time that the reservoir was assessed as to how much capacity we have, if we have an extra day (of state-required storage) or not, because at some point, when ConAgra was operational, we needed about a million gallons a day,” she noted. “Obviously, we don’t have this need anymore.

“I don’t want to have the interconnect and all of the sudden, we have a big accident at the dam and we have, as we said, we should have done that before the interconnect.”

Snyder told Landis the assessment was carried out before ConAgra closed its food facility.

“Obviously, you look at your current demands to determine how much capacity that you have, but the thing is that could change in a year or two, if an industry was to come in as a big water user, so I don’t like to look at that number, I like to look at historical records to see what it was up to,” he added. “So, that’s what the storage needs was based on was a million gallons.”

Trustee James Lynden asked if that freed-up capacity puts Fredonia in compliance with the state standard for storage, to which Snyder admitted he has not crunched the numbers yet. Lynden then pointed out there is an agreement in place for emergency water from Dunkirk through the use of an already-existing interconnect, though Snyder argued that amount is negligible.

“But it’s still countable,” Lynden countered. “It may be negligible, but it’s still something.”

Trustee Phyllis Jones asked if the village must be tied to the regional water district if it takes the grant funding for the interconnect, to which Horrigan replied it would not obligate the village to join.

She then expressed she does not understand why the village is obligated to pay for the entire interconnect, even though much of it is in Dunkirk. Lynden and Landis later agreed.

“This interconnect would not serve the water district,” Horrigan replied. “It serves the village and village customers because it provides the storage … it doesn’t serve any water district customers.”

Horrigan suggested a followup meeting be held between the village and the county to discuss the interconnect and storage needs further, to which Landis agreed she would be open to such a meeting.

“I personally would love to do something to help Fredonia on the storage side; forget the district, I don’t have a dog in the district fight, but I know that should something happen where you need water …,” Horrigan told the board. “You survived the drought OK this past summer, but what if there’s another one? For the university, for your residents to have a redundant water supply seems to make all the sense in the world, for me, for a relatively small price of 40 cents per (thousand gallons increase in the water rate).”

Landis said she does not disagree something needs to be done in terms of storage, but the village must be sensible in terms of how much water rates can rise, especially since it must get going on dam and spillway improvements.

“Every community has financial problems, so we are trying to be responsible,” she concluded.

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