Borough Manager Dave Hazlett has proposed to the Carroll Valley Borough Council to consider dissolving the Borough’s sewer and water authority. The Authority is responsible for the long-range public sewer and water facilities planning goals of Carroll Valley.
The authority has struggled to find volunteers to serve on its board as of late, forcing council members to often sit in to keep meetings going, according to Borough Manager Dave Hazlett. When the sewer water authority was created in the 1970’s, municipalities had very limited borrowing power and the way to get around that was to set up ‘authorities’ that on paper had tangible property that they could take loans out on. However, times have changed, according to Hazlett, and municipalities like Carroll Valley can now easily borrow money, or see bonds to cover operating cost, he said.
Carroll Valley has a legal ‘leaseback’ agreement with the authority, whereby the authority owns the sewer plant, piping and lines, and the collection system, and leases them all back to the borough. "Borough staff operates everything and all the money form customers, as well as bill paying is being handled by the borough staff," he said, adding "the authority doesn’t have any real employees, just a volunteer Board."
Hazlett noted that for years the agreement has only served to created an unnecessary level of bureaucracy between the borough and the authority. Dissolvement would eliminate the current confusing leaseback operations, as well as streamline the application process for future funding needs, according to Hazlett.
If the council agrees to dissolve the authority, ownership of the sewer system will revert back directly to the Borough which will then be whole responsible for all aspect of the operation, eliminating any future need for Borough staff to interact with the authority’s Board on such things as maintenance and operations issues and cost, necessary modifications, or permitting issues.
"Dissolving the authority in no way discounts the efforts put in by volunteers who run the authority" Hazlette said. "Everyone that has served has done a wonderful job."
The positive aspect of having a sewer and water authority is that is theoretically allowing the use of the borough waste and sewer services outside the borough’s municipal boundaries without regulations, while a water and sewer system run by the borough it would be required by regulations to seek outside approve form the State’s Public Utility Commission (PUC) to support customers outside of the Borough limits.
But as noted by Hazlett, the amount of sewer and water customers outside the borough has "diminished" over the years and he doesn’t foresee new ones coming in, thereby reducing the need to ever interact with the Public Utility Commission.
Many other municipal sewer authorities don’t intertwine with their local municipalities like we do, where municipal staff does all the work. "Ours is a very unique case in that regard," he said.
Before taking any action, the he council asked Hazlett for a follow-up briefing and has asked for input from the sewer and water authority.
