USDA Creates Water Woes for My Mountain

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The Fannin County Water Authority held its regularly scheduled meeting on Wednesday, August 21, 2013. The details discussed would have My Mountain residents frustrated with delays. After the meeting was called to order, the minutes were approved for the July 2013 meeting; then the board moved onto old business. Chairman Mike Queen informed the media that the Ford property that the county purchased had been closed on.

After the old business was concluded, engineer Matt Smith spoke to the board regarding the estimate received by the City of Blue Ridge for water meter reading and billing. The goal of the authority is to be able to use a third party to do the billing due to the volume of customers signed up for the CDBG (Hidden Valley) and My Mountain projects.

The quote received by the city is $1.80 per 1,000 gallons. Based on this rate, with 225 customers using 5,000 gallons per month, the gross revenue for My Mountain would be $57,375 per year. After paying the city to perform billing and meter reading services, as well as the water purchase price, the net revenue would be reduced to $2,700 per year.

For the CDBG project, based on 40 customers using 4,000 gallons per month, the gross revenue would be $6,120 per year but after paying the proposed fees to the city, the project would cost the county $4,536. As Smith explained that other possibilities are out there, Chairman Queen stated that he had met with Tri-State EMC to discuss their billing method and that they recommended Arista.

“The City of McCaysville also uses Arista for their billing and they spoke highly of them as well”

he said. The board unanimously agreed to make a decision on a third party billing company after exploring more options, such as the Arista program.

After explaining his calculations for the cost of billing, Smith went on to discuss the progress made on the My Mountain project.

“We’ve done everything that we need to do”

he said.

“We are just waiting on approval from the USDA to move forward”

he continued. Smith went on to say that the USDA has had the application for over 30 days and this type of processing time isn’t normal but that they hoped to receive a response in the next week or so but also emphasized that project cannot move forward until approval has been received. Unless approval is received by early September, the project will not be completed by its proposed completed date of early 2014. Regardless, he hopes that the delay will not push the project back a significant amount of time but only by a month or two, at the most.

“At this point, we’re just waiting on the USDA and we have done all we can do”

said Chairman Queen.

The new business of the meeting was rather short and sweet. The board made a motion and were all in favor to use BB&T for the Interim Financing at the interest rate of 1.47% for up to two years. This was the lowest interest rate compared to 2.9% offered by Park Sterling Bank and 2.017% by United Community Bank.

The final item of new business was the requirement of signatures on the Right of Way Certificate. After the signatures were complete, the board requested to go into executive session but no decisions were made.

The next water authority meeting is scheduled for September 18, 2013. FYN will follow the water woes for My Mountain residents.

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