New area water district waiting on final grant

After almost five years of work, rural residents north of Cape Girardeau will have to wait a little longer before switching from well water of questionable quality to water supplied by a new public water district.

Voters approved $550,000 in revenue bonds for construction of waterworks for Public Water Supply District No. 5 in August 2002. Since that time, board members have sought to sign residences and businesses on as customers while pursuing additional grant funding to pay the projected $2.8 million cost of the project.

"We get calls daily wanting to know when it is coming," said Judy Foeste of Foeste Masonry, president of the water district board.

Chris Koehler of Koehler Engineering said, "My hope is that it would be this fall sometime, probably late fall."

But he said he can't give a definite time when the first gallon will be pumped to a user because of the uncertainty in gaining approval of construction plans and winning a grant.

Cape Girardeau County Presiding Commissioner Gerald Jones on Thursday signed a request for that grant, a $500,000 Community Development Block Grant that is the last piece of funding needed. The rest of the project will be provided by an $880,000 rural development loan and a $1.4 million grant, both from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

"This has been a learning process, most definitely," Foeste said. "When they give you a check-off sheet, you are dumbfounded."

The block grant request must still be approved by the Community Development Division of the Missouri Department of Economic Development, said Margaret Yates of the Southeast Missouri Regional Planning and Economic Development Commission. "This is a competitive grant just like all the other grants," she said.

The district is also awaiting approval of the engineering for the water system from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, Koehler said.

"We can't bid the project until we have secured all the funding required to do it and submitted it to DNR for the construction permits," he said.

The biggest customer for the water district will be the Nell Holcomb School District, which serves 340 students from kindergarten to eighth grade. The district's first project will be to dig a well, build a treatment and storage plant and install 31.5 miles of water mains to supply about 200 residences and smaller businesses as well as the school.

"It means we may get off the well water and stop spending money on our water softener and monthly testing," said Darryl Pannier, superintendent of Nell Holcomb. "Not that our water is bad, but this will be better water."

Water from individual wells in the district contains heavy concentrations of sulfates and iron, which means the water must be filtered and softened. The new well will be a shallow well that has much purer water, Koehler said.

"The typical water from a home well is very red, with a lot of iron oxide in it," he said.

The sulfates and the iron don't make the water unusable, but they do give the water a distinct smell and color. Foeste said that if she didn't have a carbon filtration system and a water softener installed, her water would be orange. The sulfates in untreated well water can also have a strong laxative effect.

The trade-off for capping individual wells will be a monthly charge for water service of about $42, Koehler said. That is in addition to the $350 fee paid by each customer who signed up during the early sign-up period and the costs of installing a water line from each home to the meter on each property.

Customers who waited to sign up must pay the $350, plus a meter charge for installing the connection to the water main, a cost that could go as high as $1,400, he said.

"It took a long time to get enough people signed up to make it a financially viable proposition," Koehler said. "We needed a certain minimum number of users, and even with the users we have, which is just under 200, we were waiting for significant grant assistance to become available."

Pannier estimates the school will save money spent on salt for the water softener and personnel to maintain the system. The water district will also provide greater reliability, he said. "It will be cheaper every month," Pannier said. "And if the well or pump should fail, we would be in dire straits."

The water treatment plant will be just north of Nell Holcomb School with the well approximately a half-mile due west, Koehler said.

rkeller@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 126