WINNSBORO (Aug. 4, 2016) – Town Council reviewed Tuesday night a draft of an ordinance that will allow the Town to borrow up to $6 million to improve their utility system.
“This is just a draft of the ordinance,” Mayor Roger Gaddy told Council. “We want to give everybody a chance to review it and see if there are any additions or deletions or anything they don’t understand about it so at the next meeting we can bring it back for the first reading.”
According to the draft ordinance, the funds will provide for the rehabilitation of Winnsboro’s wastewater treatment plant and related sewer improvements; construction, replacement and rehabilitation of electric distribution lines and substation breakers; and construction and extension of natural gas lines and “cathodic improvements.”
Town Manager Don Wood said after the meeting that “cathodic improvements” essentially means the grounding of natural gas lines to prevent electrical discharges into the lines. The replacement of some of the Town’s power lines, Wood said, was on the to-do list because some of those lines are undersized.
“They were OK when we put them (the lines) in,” Wood said, “but we have more people on the system now and people use more electricity now.”
The infrastructure improvements come as the Town is also acquiring the last of the necessary rights of way to run a raw water line from the Broad River to the reservoir. The approximately $13 million project is expected to bring anywhere between 8 and 10 million gallons of water a day into Winnsboro’s system.
“Most small towns our size, their infrastructure – water, sewer – most of the stuff under the ground has been there for quite some time, for years we’ve been doing a lot of patchwork,” Gaddy told colleagues at last June’s intergovernmental meeting. “Hopefully (with the bond) we can do larger stretches of infrastructure and get it to where it’s up to snuff and we don’t have as much problems with it – not that we’re always putting out fires, but as everything else, including me, its aging and wearing out.”
Council will hold first reading of the bond ordinance during their Aug. 16 meeting.
