N.S. wants control of water system
NORTH SMITHFIELD – After voicing dissatisfaction with the state of some City of Woonsocket maintained water lines in the town, members of the Town Council on Monday voted to explore options for taking over those lines and maintaining them as a part of the town’s water system.
The proposal was submitted to the five-member council as resolution by its president, John Beauregard, and approved by a unanimous poll of the panel.
Prior to its vote, the council heard several residents propose alternative action to the creation of an expanded local water system in town including the submission of a formal request for the state Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to intervene on the town’s behalf and order Woonsocket to address the existing waterline deficiencies.
One resident, James DeCelles, said he was well aware of the concerns over the state of water lines in the community as a consumer of Woonsocket water but suggested the move to an expanded water system in the local community was not the answer to those issues.
“We are considering taking them off the hook,” DeCelles said.
Woonsocket has taken on improvement of lines as part of its water system’s operation and also secured funding those projects, but DeCelles, a public water system
engineer by trade, said he would be “hard pressed to think of one they have done on this side of the border.”
Even with such a lack of local improvements, DeCelles said he would not recommend that the town pursue taking on responsibility for the water system.
“The days of small water systems are long gone,” DeCelles said.
Rather that operate small systems, DeCelles said the trend has been for communities to turn over those smaller systems to larger systems with better resources to operate them.
The town’s current water system, the Slatersville Public Water Supply, provides water purchased from Woonsocket to services in Slatersville, Forestdale and the Industrial Park as well as a number of streets off Great Road and connecting neighborhoods.
That system has rates that could become even more burdensome to residents if the system were expanded to cover improvements of the existing water lines, according to DeCelles.
A better approach, he argued, would be to pursue an appeal to the PUC seeking to have Woonsocket conduct the needed repairs.
The council also heard residents tell of existing problems with lines that are severely deteriorated and break frequently or are too narrow and restricted to properly supply the homes they serve.
Another resident, Jeff Corriveau, said Woonsocket would fix breaks in lines that are deemed public lines but would not cross onto private property to fix lines that are considered private home services.
The private lines are considered to be those running from the last shut-off valve in the public line onto private property, according to Corriveau.
In some cases, residents reported that the North Smithfield Public Works Department and the city’s water department have teamed up to fix lines that were in the street and considered part of the public system.
The local water line problems were also raised by Town Administrator Gary Ezovski who noted many have existed for years. That might be a reason for a committee or even his administration to study options for repairing them, he offered.
“I’m not suggesting that we have all the answers, it is going to take some work,” Ezovski said.
He also supported taking some form of action to address the problems. “We’ve got to fix these things, we just can’t let it wait,” he said.
In the case of the most deteriorated lines in the town, something will break and then the repairs will need to be done while people are without water, according to the administrator.
He also pointed to the larger systems as the trend in providing water service and representing the “better system,” but said something still needs to be done at the local level because “the small system we have is not working.”
Beauregard said he decided to introduce the water system proposal resolution as a way to look at all the options available to the town in correcting the existing problems.
“If nothing else, we’re starting the discussion,” Beauregard said. “So I am going to help some people whether they want my help or not,” he added while noting some of the objections to the move. The panel approved a resolution calling for a subcommittee to be created to study the options available to the town. Beauregard said the Council will consider appointments to the panel at its next meeting. Follow Joseph Nadeau on Twitter: @JNad75