Salt in water supply could cost city $150,000
By Nick Claussen
March 27, 2008
A little salt in the water may end up costing the city of Athens more than $150,000.
The water problem was caused by the salt pile at the city’s service garage, and is related to a violation the city had more than 20 years ago with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Nancy Bain, who represents the Third Ward on Athens City Council, explained that because of the violation in the 1980s, the city must regularly test the water near the service garage. In the latest round of testing, the chloride problem from the city’s salt was found, she said.
It may sound minor, but this chloride problem will cost the city at least $150,000 to solve the problem and undertake additional testing, she said. In addition, this will extend the EPA testing period and is something that could have been avoided, Bain said.
“It’s just frustrating,” she said.
Bain argued that if the city had built a way to better contain the salt at the city garage, or at least put something on the ground to hold it better, the city would not face this problem. The city does have a salt bin, but the salt often ends up on the ground, she said.
She said she has been pushing for the city to fix this problem for several years, and now it will cost the Athens $150,000.
Ray Hazlett, deputy auditor for the city, said that he worked on this issue when he served as assistant service/safety director and then as service/safety director, and he is still assisting the city administration with it.
He and Andy Stone, street director for the city, talked several times about ways to keep the salt off of the ground, he said. Part of the problem is that when the salt is loaded into trucks to be taken to city streets, the salt can spill onto the ground, Hazlett said.
In addition, when cinders are mixed with the salt, the leftover mix sometimes is dumped onto a pile on the ground, he said.
Hazlett worked with former Mayor Ric Abel and former Service/Safety Director Wayne Key (now deceased) to try to find a new place in the city to move the salt bin and the service garage, but no location was ever found.
“Trying to find a piece of ground not in the flood plain or in a residential neighborhood is not easy,” Hazlett said. If the city could have moved the service garage, it would have taken the salt bin out of the testing area, he added.
Athens Mayor Paul Wiehl said the previous administration did not want to spend a lot of money building a new salt bin at the current service garage, since the plan was to move the service garage to another location.
If the city had moved the salt bin in the last few years or built something to better contain the salt, it still might not have helped the city avoid this new problem, Hazlett said.
“If we had been able to move that salt bin, I don’t know if that would have been soon enough or not. The salt has been building up in the soil there ever since the service garage has been down there,” he said.
The city is now taking actions to neutralize the effects of the chloride in the ground, Hazlett said.
After the city makes it through eight testing periods in two years with no problems in the water, the final closure plan can be completed for the EPA and the monitoring wells can be capped and filled, Hazlett said. The city made it through seven monitoring periods with no problems and then the salt problem was found on the eighth, he said.
Now, the city will spend $90,000 on the clean-up plan and on monitoring this year, and then between $30,000 and $40,000 on monitoring next year, and then thousands more the year after that, Hazlett said. The money will come out of the Street Department, he added.
It’s frustrating to be so close to being finished with the EPA studies, Hazlett said, and then have this problem come up, and it is a lot of money for the city to have to spend.
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