Officials hopeful for sewer grant funding
Seeking money for upgrades
WATERVLIET, N.Y. » Officials said they are hopeful the city will receive grant funding by the end of the year for upgrades to the city’s sewer system.
On Thursday, the City Council voted unanimously to approve a resolution authorizing the issuance of an amount not to exceed $5 million in serial bonds for the purpose of financing the reconstruction of the City of Watervliet sewer system.
City General Manager Jeremy Smith explained that city officials would not actually be taking out a $5 million bond for the project, but that they had to show that they had the funding commitment in order to apply for the money through the state Consolidated Funding Application grant program.
“We’ve done this in the past, when applying for certain grants you need to show that you have the funding commitment for the city for the project,” said Smith. “We have a project to separate our [Combined Sewer Overflow], we’ve had an engineering report done on that, so there’s two different types of funding sources that are out there, one of the funding sources requires you to have a bond resolution in place for the entire project.
“For us to take on the entire project, it’s certainly not cost effective if we needed to pay for the whole thing, but if we receive the grant that we’ve applied for, it is then certainly cost effective, so the bond resolution makes us eligible for the grant and it shows our commitment to the project and we feel very strongly in our grant application that we will be awarded the grant.”
Smith went on to note that if the city is not awarded the grant by the end of the year that he would recommend the council not move forward with the project.
“If we had to the pay the entire $5 million it would not be cost effective, so ultimately we have this bond resolution, we have these applications in for these grants and once we hear back about the grants we can then put together the capital project,” said Smith.
Smith said the city has five combined sewer out falls and this project would help to separate all of them and he believes the project is important and beneficial for the city to do if they are awarded the grant funding.
“This does two things when we separate it, the first one is it stops any sanitary sewage from going into the river from the city of Watervliet, which obviously is a very good thing and we would love to be able to accomplish that,” said Smith. “The second part of it, the part that’s cost effective for the city is that right now a lot of our storm water gets sent down to [Albany] County and gets processed, there’s no reason to process storm water, so we’re paying for storm water to get processed that we don’t need to send down there to get processed. In doing this separation our cost to the county would go down because we would no longer be sending as much flow down to them. If we receive this grant and we do this project then this is a huge win.”
Mayor Michael Manning and Councilman Charles Patricelli also believe that this project is good for the city to do and are also hopeful that they will receive the grant funding for it. Councilman Frank McGrouty did not immediately return a phone call for comment Monday morning.
“It’s an important project because of the responsibilities that goes along with having these Combined Sewer Overflows,” said Manning.
“The money that we would save by not having rain water go down to the sewer district because we pay by the volume would also be a future potential savings that would long-term pay for itself,” added Patricelli.