Orange wants input on sewerage

Town of Orange says struggling to find way to pay for new sewer plant required by state

Date published: 1/9/2008

BY ROBIN KNEPPER

It's time to get Orange town residents involved in the decision about a new sewer plant, Town Manager Cole Hendrix says.

"The community doesn't realize the magnitude of this and the costs to them as individuals," he told the Town Council at a work session Monday night.

"We have not really had a conversation with the community," he said, "and we must do that. And it needs to be an orderly process."

Financing for the new plant has been assured by grants and loans from the state. But the town must pay back the loans.

Hendrix presented council members with preliminary figures for financing the new plant. For a 3-million-gallon-a-day plant, the cost would exceed $25 million.

Even with a grant and a low-interest loan, the debt service is estimated to be $961,702 a year for 20 years.

The town has already spent more than $1 million on the project. As of May 1, the town will have only $1.9 million in cash reserves.

How to raise the money to pay the debt service? Raising the tap fees to developers would work if there were enough construction going on, but there are no developers lined up to build houses right now.

Raising the monthly sewer rates to the town's 1,700 customers is a possibility, but the rate is already going up 7 percent every year. And even adding $40 a month to the monthly bill wouldn't cover the debt service.

"It's insane," said Council member Stacey Timmons.

Raising property taxes also won't help much. "Doubling the personal-property tax would only bring in $450,000 a year," Hendrix said, "and the people won't stand for that."

Councilman Harry Hopkins suggested a business tax, at a flat rate of perhaps $200 a year. "They're the ones who are going to benefit," he said.

But, he added, the town will need to double its population of 4,000 to support any increase in town business.

Without the new plant, the state Department of Environmental Quality will not allow any new hookups to the existing plant, effectively stopping all residential and commercial building in the town.

What to do?

"People should have the opportunity to come here and talk about it," said Timmons. "And if they can't come here, I'll go out and talk to them about it."

But even with Timmons' support, the council took no action. It may address the issue again when it next meets Feb. 22.

"I hope we'll have the information we need by the next meeting to make an intelligent presentation to the town," Mayor Henry Lee Carter said yesterday.

"We need to know the effect of doing nothing because that's what people are going to ask about."

ORANGE'S DILEMMA Town of Orange officials have been wrestling with the problems of a malfunctioning sewer plant and its inability to send a clean discharge into the Rapidan River for many years. After numerous pollution violations at the plant, the state's Department of Environmental Quality stepped in more than two years ago and the town agreed to build a new facility. But the new plant will cost millions of dollars and the town isn't sure how it will repay the loans for the project.

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Date published: 1/9/2008

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