Pound Ridge Approves Special Water District

POUND RIDGE, N.Y. - Pound Ridge took a step towards resolving its water woes last month when voters in the Scotts Corners business district approved a proposal to create a special water district.

Its actual formation could take up to a year, town officials said. It would service about 114 people.

Thirty-nine owners of residential and business properties were eligible to weigh in on Oct. 24. Twenty voted “yea” and 15, “nay.”

The town is now authorized to seek to be hooked into a water storage tank owned and operated by the Stamford, Conn.-based Aquarion Water Company at the Pound Ridge Golf Club on High Ridge Road.

That was one of several approaches explored by the town’s engineering consultants.

Other options weighed when considering the water issue had included the utilization of the Siscowit Reservoir near the New York/Connecticut border as a raw water supply and the construction of a filtration/disinfection facility with a 200,000-gallon storage tank.

Also looked at was having each individual property owner with private wells install their own treatment systems, meaning they would have to pay for quarterly testing and replacement of components as necessary.

If the $11,129,000 project moves forward, 13,000 feet of water main would have to be constructed.

In the beginning of this month, Supervisor Kevin Hansan announced that he’d received a letter from the state Environmental Facilities Corp. (EFC) confirming that the town had been awarded a $7,634,900 state Water Infrastructure Improvement Act (WIIA) grant to support drinking water improvements in Scotts Corners.

That funding, and $3.3 million in general obligation bonds and/or notes plus the recent approval of the district should, he said, take the town “one step closer to delivering fresh water from Stamford to our business community.”

The bonds or notes would be payable by “benefit assessments” upon the properties in the water district, and not by the rest of the town’s taxpayers.

Hansan said that he thought that all Pound Ridge stakeholders will benefit from the improvements and that the business district will be more “viable and functional.”

He also pointed to “enhancements” that have already been made such as new sidewalks, lighting, and a town green.

(The sewage situation is another matter. Septic tanks/fields and wells in the business district are extremely close. It’s something that today’s standards wouldn’t have allowed, Hansan noted.)

According to the supervisor, 102 municipalities across New York received a combined $435 million in funding through WIIA and Intermunicipal Grant (IMG) programs.

In Westchester, only four municipalities were awarded grants: the towns of Pound Ridge, Lewisboro, and North Salem, and the village of Buchanan.

The town also intends to apply for low-interest financing from the EFC through its Drinking Water State Revolving Fund program.

The district won’t be formally established until the town has the WIIA grant and the EFC financing in hand.
 

The costs of the district will be apportioned based on the equivalent dwelling unit (EDU) of each property in the proposed district. A single-family home, for instance, would be assigned an EDU of 1, while commercial properties would have EDUs ranging from 1 to 50.

Assuming the district gets the necessary grants and financing, the annual “user cost” per EDU is about $856, an amount made up of debt service costs ($590) and operation and maintenance costs ($266).

This assumes that the property does not exceed its designated EDU usage.

The expected average annual cost to the typical property owner is about $2,568 (for a commercial property with an EDU of 3) and about $865 for the typical one-family home in the proposed district.

There is no proposed “hook-up” fee imposed by the district, but each property owner will be responsible for the one-time cost associated with the installation of, and connecting to, the water lateral and the installation of a town-supplied water meter.

The final cost will depend on the actual length of the service line and the complexity of the installation process.
It’s a well-known fact that fuel and chemicals from businesses such as a dry cleaner and an old gas station had been leaching for a long time into the hamlet’s groundwater.

“I’m very pleased that we’re doing this now, but I think it’s something the town should have done 20 years ago” when the contamination was discovered, Hansan said last week.

The final blow was the discovery of PFOS (perfluorooctane sulfonic acid) and PFAS (perfluorooctanoic acid) in the water. The manmade or synthetic compounds are known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the environment and accumulate in the bodies of animals that consume them.

Relatively recently, the U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued the first-ever national, enforceable drinking water standards on PFAS/PFOS exposure.

It required water utilities to test for six of the chemicals and to take action to remove them from drinking water if harmful levels are found to be present.

PFAS were widely used in products such as water-repellent clothing, stain-resistant fabrics, non-stick cookware, personal care products such as shampoo and nail polish, and firefighting foams.