Thursday, November 7, 2024

Burlington residents brace for ‘eye-popping’ water infrastructure increases

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BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – Burlington residents will likely see a hefty increase in their water and sewer bills. City officials on Thursday invited community members on a tour of the wastewater plant to get a firsthand look at some of the needed improvements.

“I think it’s really important for everyone to understand what goes on here,” said Doug Goodman, a Burlington resident who took part in Thursday’s tour.

The main wastewater plant was built in 1953 and last upgraded in 1994. Now, the city’s Megan Moir says the system is in desperate need of an overhaul. “We can’t keep limping along. We have amazing staff. They keep lots of things running but that’s not a way to run a modern, resilient city,” she said.

Moir says the likelihood of failure for certain parts of the system is too high. In a recent risk report card, more than 50 percent of their systems received a C minus grade, meaning they need to be replaced within the next three years.

Officials are still crunching the numbers but they estimate between wastewater, drinking water, and stormwater, the bill will run well over $200 million. It’s still too early to determine the implications for ratepayers. “All I can say that it is, it is significant in that my eyes popped a bit,” Moir said.

The project could include upgrades to critical wastewater infrastructure, including more backup systems in case one fails. It will also include advanced treatment technology to pull out as much phosphorous as possible to prevent it from going into the lake. And Moir says it will expand the system’s capacity.

“We know there’s some very large projects that are being talked about, not just the ones that are already under construction, but large projects that are being talked about that are going to need wastewater capacity. And we have to be able to say we’re going to have that capacity and we’re getting to a space where that’s a little bit harder to do,” Moir said.

She says the scale of the project might have been avoided if the city had gradually raised rates and replaced aging systems over the past three decades. “We’re just kind of up against a wall where, again, the risk of failure has grown too high for us professionally to be able to say, Oh, we can make it a little bit longer,” she said.

A preliminary projected impact on water rates is expected in the next few weeks. Moir says they will work to find the best borrowing mechanism to mitigate rate impacts but that the project is shaping up to be more expensive than the new high school that added hundreds to annual tax bills.

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