The 2007 agreement between the Piedmont Water Co. and the Eatonton-Putnam Water and Sewer Authority (EPWSA) that defined service areas in Putnam County is set to expire in 2027, a little over three years from now.
In that agreement, Piedmont would serve the northern and eastern areas of the county, including the lucrative Lake Oconee area, with its tanks, lines, and collection of community wells. EPWSA’s territory for service and expansion would include Eatonton, the bulk of the Lake Sinclair basin, and less-populated areas in the western part of the county.
The termination of the agreement may be three-plus years away, but informal talks this year are increasingly pointing to avoiding open competition.
Putnam Commission Chairman (and this year’s EPWSA chairman) Bill Sharp has thrown out the figure of $120 million for EPWSA to totally compete with Piedmont in the Lake Oconee area with a production plant, tanks, and an overlay of Piedmont’s distribution lines.
Utilities historically and everywhere avoid costly – and risky – face-to-face competition, preferring instead to let the government provide a stable and predictable pushback against monopolistic practices (and prices) with a Public Service Commission (PSC).
Georgia’s PSC oversees and regulates everything from electric power companies to phone companies to intrastate bus lines – but not municipal water and sewer services, where local voters theoretically have some sway.
Instead of open competition, the drift of the informal Piedmont-EPWSA talks would have the two entities keep their current territorial boundaries – but with a twist. EPWSA, in conjunction with the Sinclair Water Authority (SWA), which produces the water distributed by EPWSA and Baldwin County, would sell quality water to Piedmont, which reportedly has experienced occasional problems with both water quality and water pressure in some areas.
That possible approach would involve a third entity, the Sinclair Water Authority. At the SWA board’s bi-monthly meeting on Monday, ESG project manager Brice Doolittle introduced the idea for the board to “begin thinking about.”
The problem? Money. Adding a fifth “train” of electrically charged belts to swish back and forth attracting the finest particles of solid matter in the treatment process may become necessary in the near future anyway, but their manufacture and installation could cost $1.5 to $2 million, perhaps more in an inflationary environment, ESG regional vice president Neil Counts said.
Sustained maximum production at the Cay Drive production plant lies in the 5.5-million-gallons-per-day (mgd) range. In August, with one train regularly down for maintenance and cleaning, the maximum production over four days hit 4.275 mgd.
The upside to adding a fifth train (and with EPWSA selling water to Piedmont) would come in reducing Putnam’s share of costs in running the plant. When SWA was set up 20 years ago, Putnam and Baldwin were to split both the access to the water and the costs 50-50. The most recent production reports show Baldwin using 63 percent of the water, and Putnam, 37 percent.
The SWA board members seemed receptive to the idea, but more than one stated the sentiment, “We are not going to give money away.”