Friday, May 21, 2004
By Dian McClurg dmcclurg@chronline.com, The Chronicle
The state will offer Chehalis about $36 million toward building a new wastewater treatment plant, according to a release Thursday from the Department of Ecology.
"It's very good news," City Manager Dave Campbell said.
DOE's offer includes about $33 million in a 20-year, zero-percent loan from the state's Water Pollution Control Revolving Fund, and a $3.4 million grant from the Centennial Clean Water Fund.
The list of projects for which the state will pay in 2005, which includes several others from Lewis County, is a preliminary offer. Ecology has to wait 30 days for the public to comment on the draft before it can make final offers.
"But it certainly looks good right now," Campbell said. "Typically the draft list and the final list don't change too much." Chehalis city councilors will have to decide later this summer whether to accept the grant and the loan. They can use the money only if they decide to go forward with the plan to build a new wastewater treatment plant, Campbell said.
"We couldn't use if for any other purpose or any other facility than the plant we have under design," he said.
Councilors are waiting for a report from their Seattle-area consultant, due early next month, on the comparative economic effect of joining with Centralia in a regional sewer treatment plant. Centralia has made Chehalis an offer, and councilors are considering it.
The city could receive low-interest loans and grants from the state if it decided to join with Centralia, but city workers would have to start the application over from scratch, Campbell said.
"First we'd have to submit a new facilities design, and I don't know how long it would take to go through another engineering process," he said.
Last year, the council had to submit its application in the fall. This year, Ecology will be pushing that deadline to earlier in the year.
"It took us probably about a year to prepare the current specs and plans for the plant and other facilities," Campbell said.
If Chehalis were to accept the state's offer for $33 million in loans and $3.4 million in grants, the money would cover the entire cost of a $42 million treatment plant — with the $10 million Public Works Trust Fund money the city received recently.
And it would mean that customer rates in that utility would stay at the low end of possible increases. Sewer rates would rise from the average $56 per month for a single-family household to about $103 per month.
Coupled with potential increases in water and stormwater utilities, however, the result is still high. The average household can expect its total bill, including water, sewer and stormwater, to increase about 75 percent by 2009, according to data supplied by the city's consulting firm Financial Consulting Solutions Group.
Campbell said the city intends to seek other grants as well as this being offered by the Department of Ecology. Chehalis could receive more grants, up to a total of $5 million, from DOE, and other funding sources are still available.
"Our hope would be to get grant money as we can so we don't have to accept all of the loan money," Campbell said.
Dian McClurg covers city government for Centralia and Chehalis, and health issues for The Chronicle. She may be reached at 807-8239, or by e-mail at dmcclurg@chronline.com.
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