Butte County supervisors approve $364K for well project
The Butte County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a budget appropriation for the Palermo Clean Water Consolidation Project to the tune of $364,862 during its Sept. 28 meeting.
Interim Water and Resource Conservation District Director Christina Buck led a presentation on the state of the project during the meeting that went over funding options, possible grants and a schedule for the project.
“Most residents in the Palermo community have groundwater wells and septic systems so flooding, drainage issues, high groundwater levels and contaminated septic systems that regularly fail have contributed to contamination of water wells there as well as potential contamination of the groundwater aquifer,” Buck said of the necessity of the project. “It’s a health and safety concern that the county has been trying to address in a number of ways for a long time.”
There are 380 parcels of land that could be attached to the South Feather Water and Power Agency, which is what the project goal is, at an estimated cost of a little over $12.4 million.
The agency is contributing $700,000 to the project with the rest requiring some form of grant funding.
Buck said the identified possible funding sources consist of the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, Proposition 1 funding, Prop 68 funding, the DWR Small Community Drought Program and the American Rescue Plan Act.
The appropriated money will go toward the costs of completing grant applications to fund the project.
Board Chair Bill Connelly, whose district the zone resides in, backed the project.
“There’s a long history here where we’ve tried to figure out how to bring a sewer plant out there or get them into the Oroville sewer and it just will never pencil out,” Connelly said. “The demographic are fairly low income in its entire core area and the pollution is real. There are people who are made ill by it. We retested it and found out there’s still evidence of pollution and it’s so terrible that in a wet winter they’ll take the caps off of their sewer line because their septics won’t work and then it’s spilling out into unsealed wells.”
Connelly said it was much cheaper to hook the parcels up to a clean water source.
Little discussion was had among the supervisors after the presentation and only one woman spoke during the public comment period to say “ditto” to Connelly’s statement.
The Butte County Board of Supervisors meets at 9 a.m. every second and third Tuesday of the month at its chambers located at 25 County Center Drive, Suite 205 in Oroville. Meetings are free and open to the public. Those who are not fully vaccinated are required to wear a mask while in the building.