finding the leak in our water system

Back in September, our water guy mentioned to me that there seems to be a lot of water usage going on for our limited number of users. He stated that he didn't think it was a leak, suggesting that the abnormally high flow was an intentional draw by someone on the system.

If that was the culprit, I responded, then why not monitor usage. Oh, no, he replied, monitoring is not possible. I guess its too expensive, although he really only inferred that cost was the reason why he rejected the monitoring idea faster than a bullet spins out of a gun. [My subsequent research found that such equipment is really not expensive...more on that later.]

But, let's think about this. We already pay an outrageous amount of fee for water--and water only. While living in another town of similar size--except this other town has a real industrial/commercial component, we only paid $500 a year for water AND sewer. While in Philly, we paid $450 a year, again, for both water AND sewer. In terms of paying for new infrastructure through additionally tacked on fees or assessments, the comparison pretty much washes out--the systems were pretty much the same and neither included some cutting edge technology or water director genius administering the system. No system provided pure drinking water--all still tested with "contaminants" although the quality met government standards.

Here, we pay $455 a year just for water, and another $150 for water main replacement. We pay that regardless of whether our home is even used for less than one day out of the entire year. And, our fearless leaders like to promote the image that the summer demand for water is huge--so huge that it puts excessive burdens on our system and requires full time--year-round, staff to monitor and administer. However, after living here year round and researching actual nembers, I find that assertion suspect, to say the least. That they do not want to put their money where their mouth is only increases my suspicion.

By asserting an unprovenn or unmonitored hi seasonal demand for water, they are able to lead us to believe that we need full time staff when we really don't, that we need a "water director" or consultant when we really don't, and that they need to charge such relatively outrageous fees, when they don't.

Just give them the argument that there is a significant increase in demand during the summer months. What exactly could peak demand be, given that there is no industry here and a little over 200 actual households. Are they suggesting that the infrastructure that they built can't handle the entire number of households and the one commercial enterprise that poses a draw of any significance? I am assuming that they are NOT taking that position, but rather, as indicated above, that they are just saying that the demand is excessive given the number of houses and businesses tied into the system.

So, even if they can prove an excessively high demand during the summer, that only justifies the possible acquisition of a summer employee--not a full-time, year-round employee--or two. And, since Borough Code allows a municipal employee to also provide other services to the community, Mr. Care could be the one hired during the summer, via his private business activities (with the Timber Services company) which also provide water related services--including water quality testing and permit acquisition, to this area. At least then there would be a paper trail and a money trail. I mean, really, why are we-as taxpayers AND again as shareholders, paying him to maintain water quality testing licenses for two of our municipal entities while he maintains the license on his own for his work performed with Timber Services?

I read some where that the Chautauqua, our homeowners association, agrees to share labor costs, etc. with these municipal entities in order to reduce the shareholders' (ergo, taxpayers') overall costs. I ask you to seriously reflect on the scenario presented in this post, and the several other scenarios that I will reveal to you in the next few posts, and ask yourself whether these cost sharing relationships really serve to reduce our costs or whether they just serve to provide our entrenched leaders with the opportunity to justify inflated expenses and staffing, redundant charges, and to rub out any transparency and possibility of follwing our tax dollar through this community. Because the reality I see is that they are really just coming up with ways to take more money from us than necessary to provide us with public services.

Oh, I think that there is a leak some where...but's it not in our water system. Its in the financial relationships and overlap in expenses and staff between our Authority, Borough, and Chautauqua. Because of all this "agreeing" and "sharing" and "transfering", our Borough budget is not any where near the $150,000 that they present to us in November to comply with the legal requirement of accepting a closed budget by December. No, we really have a $550,000 budget. And this number is not created by some third party reviewing our books--its submitted to the state every year by the very same people that submit the $150,000 budget to us.

A $550,000 budget!---no other community with our population (whether you consider our population to be 250 or 500) comes any where close to this number.* Our entrenched ones have taken the last thirty years or so to figure out how to extract nearly ten times more money from us per capita than the average for our "peer group" communities. Ten times! How can they possibly expect us to believe that they can't close the budget, or that they need to raise our taxes, fees, or assessments with this type of revenue generating, redundancy-based system that they have perfected.

And, if our leaders really want to continue to assert such a high seasonal demand for water, let's get to the source. Buy some used leak detection equipment or monitoring equipment. It's cheap--certainly a lot cheaper than making us pay for full-time staff and outrageous water fees annually. To get you on a path to legitimacy, oh fearless entrenched ones, here's a detector for about $1100: http://www.rjmcompany.com/leak-detection-equipment-used.htm












* Shippingport Borough has a population of c. 242, and per capita revenue and expense numbers in the $11,000's (versus an average of $500 for other municipalities with similar populations). To call this municipality an outlier is an understatement. They are home to the first nuclear power plant in the country. And, after it closed in 1982, it became a coal fired power generation plant, placing even more toxic waste within municipal boundaries. Needless to say, having the 44th worst contaminated ground in the country involves serious litigation, mitigation, and, well, money.

Missing Dog

Meet Moses,

He disappeared from his home, the Cornwall Inn (50 Burd Coleman Rd., Cornwall) on Tuesday, January 19th. He is a "people" dog, and is very friendly.

If his collar is still on, its a black collar with a white design and red tags. If you see him or have any information for his heartbroken and worried human-companions, please call 717-302-6178 or 1-866-605-6563.

National Geographic and Sinkholes

Well, its been a while, but I just got back from a couple of weeks away, visiting some of our construction projects. At one Philly site, I installed a new bathroom-complete with refinishing a clawfoot tub before hooking it up. It had those 60's flower stickers on it, among other issues, that were impossible to remove. Only wish the sentiments that went along with those flowers lasted as long as the stickers did...

All that work however, did not keep me from pursuing one of my favorite hobbies—reading nonfiction (because its all pretty much as a tale anyway). And, recently I came across two discussions that referred my thoughts directly back to the place I now call “home.”

First, the National Geographic’s “109 Destinations Rated” (Nov/Dec 2008) took the time to mention Lancaster County, PA, in its list. Only, they placed it number two in its “Worst-Rated Places” category. Their reasoning was that “The Amish are lost amid the sprawl and schlock.”

I remembered this rating recently because of the feelings generated every time I drive by the two new banks that are being constructed on two of our major roads here. I can’t help but see in this construction the un-tempered sprawl that NG was drawing attention to by placing Lancaster County, PA in its list of worst-rated places. Both these new construction projects are classic examples of our “traditional” construction techniques, which rely heavily on building new, building fast, and on interfering with—rather than working with, the natural processes our creator gifted upon us for dealing with stormwater runoff, filtering our drinking water, and providing firmament and temperature modification for our shelters/buildings. By covering significant land area with impervious materials, by eradicating all vegetation from construction sites, and by ignoring the usefulness and ethicality of “recycling” existing buildings, we have made our lax acceptance of sprawl known to people worldwide.

The second discussion that referred my thoughts back to this area was found in Thurman and Trujullos’s Essentials of Oceanography text. In their chapter on Marine Sediments, they describe marine processes that also can be found on land, namely, that of how groundwater filtration through limestone produces sinkholes. Now, combine that info with the DEP’s, the EPA’s, and every water-conservation agency’s and municipal stormwater agency’s explanation describing how creating impervious land areas and removing one of the most effective tools for sucking up water—vegetation, namely trees, and you have to ask how effective it is to keep “plugging” the sinkhole on route 422. Wouldn’t it make more sense to deal with the etiology and not the symptoms?

Obviously, now that there are no—as in ZERO, trees there to mitigate the thousands of gallons of groundwater moving across the surface and into the limestone, and now that the total penetrable surface area has been so drastically reduced as to exacerbate the flow rate of groundwater through the limestone on that site, logic tells us that this sinkhole is only going to get worse unless we abandoned this ineffectual and unsustainable affection for sprawl that is being followed here.