Township preparing for sewer extension

Nearly two dozen homeowners in an 18-year-old neighborhood are facing $14,000 sewer hook-up costs from a $1.5 million project planned for next spring.

According to a legal notice published in the Aug. 29 edition of The Mercury, the project will take place in the Spring Mill Estates subdivision, a project constructed around 2001.

Currently 23 homes identified in the project on Spring Mill Lane, Ashbridge Court, Bentfort Court and Bechtel Road are served by on-lot septic systems.

The good news is, even after the project is finished, they can continue to be served by those septic systems, according to Bryan Bortnichak, who is Upper Providence Township’s assistant township manager.

Unlike many other sewer extension projects, “there is no obligation to connect,” Bortnichak told Media News Group.

He explained that last year, the township extended a sewer line down South Lewis Road “and two or three of the homes in Spring Mill Estates have frontage on Lewis Road and they connected as soon as sewer was available.”

“Those roads need to be repaved and it makes no sense to repave them and then tear up the road two years later to install sewer, so we’re going to do it now, before we pave the roads,” Bortnichak said.

According to the legal notice, the $13,936 connection cost includes a $10,000 “benefit assessment” as well as the township’s $1,266 tap-in fee and the $2,670 fee imposed by the Lower-Perkiomen Valley Regional Sewer Authority which operates the Oaks treatment plant that services

Trappe and College bor

oughs and Upper Providence, Lower Providence, Perkiomen and Skippack townships and discharges into the Schuylkill River.

There is capacity at the treatment plant to add the 23 homes, he said.

Bortnichak said the cost of the sewer project, divided up among the 23 properties, comes out to $65,000 per home and the township is charging each home $10,000 “and we’re covering the rest.

That cost will remain unchanged no matter how long a home owner waits to hook into the system.

“If they don’t connect for 30 years, the cost will still be $10,000,” he said.

The legal notice was required by Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection rules,

Bortnichak explained.

The project is not likely to begin until “late spring” of 2020 and is part of the 2020 capital budget, Bortnichako said.