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Orleans offers water supply for $2.7M
By Emily Sussman
Banner Staff
EASTHAM — Though a $4.8 million limited municipal water supply system may still come before voters at Town Meeting in May, the joint water boards here are now considering a very different — and perhaps cheaper — source of public water: Orleans.
Orleans Board of Water Commissioners member Ken McKusik had made the tempting offer at last month’s joint Waste Water Management and Water Resources Advisory Boards meeting here.
As a town that pumps an average of one million gallons per day for its residents, McKusik said that Orleans could feasibly provide Eastham with 500,000 gallons of water daily from its $7 million water treatment facility, which was built last year.
Eastham residents currently get their water from private wells, which, according to the results of a three-year, town-wide testing program, are increasingly testing at threshold-level nitrate contamination, and are often tainted with high, though not dangerous, levels of iron.
As proposed by Orleans, the inter-town water would be run from a 12-inch water main spanning from the Orleans rotary five miles north to Cable Road. Installing that infrastructure, Orleans Water Supt. Lou Briganti estimated at last month’s meeting, would set Eastham back about $2.7 million.
And though $2.7 million is no small chunk of change for any town on the Cape, it’s just over half of a whopping $4.8 million that the town would have to shell out for installing a limited municipal water supply of its own. (Eastham is currently the only town on Cape Cod without either a limited or full public water supply system.)
“We appreciate the limitation of individual resources and disadvantage for each town to ‘go it alone,’” McKusik wrote in a Jan. 11 letter to the Eastham joint water boards, shortly after the Orleans offer was made. (The letter was co-signed by Briganti, Orleans Board of Health and Wastewater Management Plan Steering Committee member Gussie McKusik, and Orleans Selectman John Hinckley Jr.)
The letter added that pumping in the neighborhood of 500,000 gallons per day of water to Eastham “would not have a significant negative effect on [Orleans’] groundwater levels.”
The offer from Orleans comes at a critical time in the genesis of a public water system here. Just two months ago, Environmental Partners, an off-Cape consulting firm that’s been planning Eastham’s phased approach to municipal water, had floated a $4.8 million estimate for “Phase 1” of the project — which would supply about 300 homes in the Moll’s Pond area — before the Board of Selectmen. At that same meeting, reps from the joint water boards urged the selectmen to consider putting the issue of funding Phase 1 before voters at Annual Town Meeting in May.
But according to joint water boards co-chair Karl Weiss this week, the issue of what will actually appear on the May Town Meeting warrant regarding the initiation of public water is still up in the air.
“I just don’t know,” Weiss said on Tuesday of the municipal water plan’s immediate future, adding that he and co-chair Bruce Whitmore are set to meet with Town Administrator Sheila Vanderhoef in the upcoming weeks to discuss the water-sharing option with Orleans “more seriously.”
In the meantime, reps from Orleans are waiting for a more definite response from Eastham. But until then, Orleans Water Dept. business manager Susan Brown said this week, her town can’t provide detailed figures on what the supply costs of the shared water would be once the inter-town water main was installed.
“We’d probably do it on a master meter system and bill the town semi-annually,” Brown said, adding that it would then be up to Eastham about how to divide the cost among its participating residents.
Eastham’s original “phased approach” plans for a municipal water system are still on track at this point. At the joint water boards’ meeting on Monday, members confirmed that Health Agent Jane Crowley is currently in the process of getting a pump test done for a potential well site off Nauset Road, and that an existing well on the Nauset Regional High School campus — which already has a permit to pump about 100,000 gallons per day — is the most promising possibility for getting Phase 1 online.
esussman@provincetownbanner.com
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