At last week’s Park City Council meeting, the council approved some $11 million in water projects. Council member Tim Henney says that’s good news for the city, and for the citizens who pay water rates.
The projects will clean up water from the city’s sources in the Judge and Spiro mine tunnels.
Henney said the cost could have been worse, if not for an agreement they worked out with the state water agencies.
“The stipulated compliance agreement, I think I’ve got that right, is something that we entered into back in 2014. It would have required a much larger treatment plant a much more involved process. Treating much more water.”
He said the state representatives and the city’s water department deserve a lot of credit for the amended agreement approved Thursday night.
“The state still has to approve it but all indications are that they will because its coming from their expert in conjunction with Park City. It saves $30 million right of the top on capital projects. That’s huge and we’re talking enormous figures here. The amount of money that we spend on water, its mind-blowing. So, we’re saving $30 million and that’s about a 26% reduction of what the old project was. That’s a big reduction, it’s going to have an impact on water rates. It’s going to allow us to keep our water rate increases basically CPI related versus these big jumps we’ve had to make in the past to get us up to the level we need to be at. Which we are at, under this new agreement.”
Henney said the architects of the agreement are confident it will work.
“There’s been an awful lot of discovery and work and experimentation that’s gone into this. They’re not just saying, ‘hey I hope this works.’ They’re basing it on years of working on it and testing. Everybody, including the state, is comfortable that we’ve got a 99% chance of having clean water under this new agreement. Yeah there is the slim chance that it doesn’t work and we have to come back and revisit and do something new, but it’s a great step in the right direction, a huge plus.”
