The endless rhetoric about Fredonia’s water situation continued this week, and Trustee Jon Espersen reported that engineers from the village and town of Pomfret have met over a possible collaborative effort.

“Today our engineers met with the engineers from the town of Pomfret,” he said at a Board of Trustees meeting. “I’ll be conversing with them … to see how that went and what their thoughts are, and we can think about how to move forward from that.”

Espersen supports buying water from the city of Dunkirk and closing the village’s treatment plant and reservoir. He has helped facilitate a conversation with Pomfret officials, which he calls preliminary, about linking Fredonia into the town’s Phase 2 and 3 water projects. That project is slated to be supplied by the North County Water District, which is itself reliant on Dunkirk water.

Working with the water district will save money for all of its customers, Richard Ketcham said. The former Brooks-TLC CEO and member of the blue ribbon committee that handled the new hospital set for the village, Ketcham supports buying water from Dunkirk or the NCWD.

Ketcham also praised the water district’s plans to hire an administrator and the talks with Pomfret later mentioned by Espersen. “These are things that in my mind, should be analyzed much more than what’s up on the hill,” Ketcham said, apparently referring to the water treatment plant.

Trustee Michell Twichell later read a lengthy statement about village water issues. Twichell is a firm advocate of Fredonia “going it alone” on water, while doing significant renovations to the treatment plant.

“My pro-Dunkirk colleagues continue to favor aligning our water future with two troubled entities, the city and the North County Water District,” she began. “Over $18 million of loans from New York state are keeping the city’s municipal functions, including its water, afloat. The district has borrowed $5 million from the county taxpayers and has made no repayments on the principal of the loan.”

Twichell noted the state Comptroller’s Office criticized the water district on auditing issues, and several member municipalities, such as Brocton, have expressed frustration with the district.

Twichell went on to call the assertion that the Vineyard Drive pump station shared with the city is underpowered, “shocking.”

She said, “What I’m showing is evidence that depending on other municipalities or agencies for water is fraught with peril due to their own financial infrastructure challenges. The apparent failure or underutilization of our existing interconnections also illustrates the complexities of intermunicipal water agreements. I, and many other citizens, believe Fredonia has all the resources it needs for a secure local and regional water future. We need to maintain and develop them.”

The final word of the night in Fredonia’s gigantic water debate came from Trustee Nicole Siracuse. She used her own report time to opine on the successful lawsuit against a Dec. 26 resolution she voted for, to buy water from Dunkirk and mothball the treatment plant.

“The lawsuit and the court case was never to question the validity of LaBella’s report,” she said, referring to the engineers’ fall 2023 report on village water issues. “It was the procedure and the proceedings that the board followed with the information we were given. It was not the validity of that study. That remains intact.”