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Published Friday, September 05, 2008 in Local

County contracted to buy more water while producing less

By Sarah Fay Campbell

The Times-Herald

By January, the Coweta County Water and Sewerage Authority will be buying so much water from Newnan Utilities and Griffin that the B.T. Brown Water Treatment Plant will be producing less than a million gallons per day.

On Thursday, members of the authority approved the purchase of two large water pumps that will allow the authority to draw the required amount of water from Newnan Utilities.

And the contract with Griffin ramps up over time. In January, it will jump by 320,000 gallons per day, said Ellis Cadenhead, general manager. Currently, Coweta is taking 1.68 million gallons per day.

The contracts with Newnan Utilities and Griffin require Coweta to purchase a minimum amount of water.

In order to pull that much water from Newnan, a new pump is needed on U.S. Hwy. 29 near Lake Hills and on Bullsboro Drive near the Newnan Crossing shopping center.

The U.S. 29 pump will cost $194,705, and the Bullsboro pump will cost $212,974, Cadenhead said. Work on the Bullsboro pump is waiting on the Georgia Department of Transportation, Cadenhead said. "There is a strip of land there that they thought had been deeded back to the county; the county cannot find where," Cadenhead said. "So the state is in the process of checking on it."

An estimate for the installation of the two pumps is $189,023, Cadenhead said.

But he'd rather have authority staff do the installation. However, Cadenhead asked that the installation money be left in the budget, just in case.

Currently, the authority can only draw 1.5 million gallons per day from Newnan Utilities, and is supposed to be getting three million.

"We will have to back off B.T. Brown once this comes online," Cadenhead said. "So there will be some savings there."

But water from B.T. Brown is the cheapest water the county can get.

"That is why we need to sell water," Cadenhead said.

The purchase of the pumps also required a budget adjustment.

An upgraded pipeline will be needed to be able to carry all of the water the authority has committed to buying from Griffin, but that project is several years off.

"These contracts were executed before the board was created," said Authority Chairman Neal Shepard.