Ellijay-Gilmer County Water and Sewerage Authority board members approved a $7.86 million operating budget for 2021-22 when meeting Monday, May 24.
Among capital improvement projects to start in the coming year is a large-scale change out of thousands of customers’ water meters.
At the water board’s April meeting, director Gary McVey told board members Mike Gibbs, Hubert Parker, Don Callihan, Tony Whitaker and Billy Rowe that many of the authority’s existing water meters are rapidly failing, and the software program used for the meters will expire at the end of 2021.
“We were anticipating this, but we weren’t anticipating it this soon until they said we were going to have to do away with our other system,” said McVey.
Board members approved a service license agreement for the AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) software at the May 24 meeting. McVey said digital transmitters will be put on several of the authority’s water tanks in different locations.
There are already 2,500 of the Sensus brand digitally-read meters in use, but almost 4,500 more will have to be changed out, McVey noted. That will begin next year, and the entire meter project is expected to cost $1.5 million.
The water authority’s administrative budget will also increase in the coming fiscal year, noted Bonnie Broady Dalrymple, controller. She informed board members that additional employees are needed in the areas of customer service and maintenance and distribution.
“We would like to hire two employees in (maintenance and distribution) since we’re doing a lot of the work ourselves. That way, we can maintain our regular maintenance of the system, plus be able to do more installation of utilities ourselves (rather than) contracting it out,” she said.
There is also an ongoing need for water plant and wastewater plant operators, McVey noted.
“Right now, it’s difficult to find anybody that wants to work. We’ve had advertisements out over a year for operators. We’re having to build our own operators. By building our own, there’s a risk there. When you train that operator up and they get certified, then the next town over offers them a dollar on the hour, sometimes they go and sometimes they don’t,” he added.
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﹣ McVey said the water authority’s biggest project continues to be extension of water line to the Roundtop-Sunlight Road area off Highway 382.
So far, crews have installed 10,027 linear feet of 8-inch ductile iron pipe and 7,250 feet of 6-inch ductile iron pipe, McVey noted. Work is currently being done inside the Lakeside Mobile Home Park, he added.
“They’re not going to be able to move as fast through (there) as the county roads,” McVey said. “We’ve got existing water lines, and we’re having to repair those as we go. We have started doing a couple of taps and going ahead and hooking people up to those meters.”
﹣ McVey said it’s become very difficult, during the pandemic, to get certain electronic parts needed for data system upgrades at the wastewater treatment plant.
“The lead times on a lot of these electronic parts have been greatly extended. The times we were used to seeing were four to six, maybe eight, weeks at most. They’re giving us anywhere from 16 to 24 weeks right now on a lot of this stuff,” he added.