The five-member board of the two-county Sinclair Water Authority (SWA) on Monday slogged through the approval of a 2022-23 budget, received last year’s audit, discussed loan and grant opportunities, and heard staff reports on operations, water production, and finances—all in punishing detail with numbers, pumps and valves and membranes, strange acronyms, lightning strikes, the labor market, inflated costs, supply chains, and more numbers.
Still, a few details may offer the average customer some insights into the entity that provides drinking water to more than 25,000 people over large parts of Putnam and Baldwin counties.
The budget for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, will be $1.56 million, plus another $710,000 for debt service, representing a total of $2.266 million.
“We have about tapped out on borrowing,” Putnam representative Tommy Jefferson said. “We are left with the two counties chipping in or increasing our rates.”
The big-ticket items include the ESG management fee of $688,000 (including more than $500,000 in personnel wages and benefits); repairs, $103,000; chemicals, $316,000 (up $75,000 from last year); electricity and natural gas, $165,000 (down $15,000), and the on-going Suez contract for a new set of filtration membranes at $121,000.
In 2019, SWA took advantage of lower interest rates to refinance the original construction debt, plus some additional borrowing. The payout period lasts until April 2046.
This past August, Baldwin used 62 percent of the water produced; Putnam, 38 percent.
Over the past two years, Baldwin’s monthly flow rate varied a little more than Putnam’s, but generally averaged about 2-million gallons a month. Putnam’s monthly water demand fell in the 1-to-1.2 million gallons-permonth range. However, the months of high demand and low demand for each county in the two-year period were all over the chart, presumably linked to weather conditions.
The Georgia Power Company is easily the largest single payer of property taxes in each county. In Putnam, GPC pays 5.2 percent of the county’s property taxes, with Tri-County EMC second at 1.8 percent. In Baldwin, with its larger tax base, Georgia Power pays 4.2 percent of the overall property taxes. How all that is directly relevant to SWA’s finances is unclear, but the information presumably is in the reports.
The long-awaited shipment of a new set of filtration membranes is supposedly arriving next week, along with questions about costs. The plant has four “trains” of the membranes, which does the final, fine filtration of particles with still relatively new technology using electrolysis. Current membranes have been in use since the plant was built in 2007, and one of the trains has been out of commission for the past six weeks. The membranes are believed to be manufactured in Poland, which has seen large spikes in energy costs linked to Russia’s invasion of Poland’s neighbor, Ukraine.
The SWA plant on south Putnam’s Cay Drive is experiencing a labor shortage of trained technicians. ESG regional manager Neil Counts said he is exploring the development of an internship program with Central Georgia Technical College.