By JOAN McCOY
Leader staff writer
Fourteen miles of pressurized waterline connecting Cabot to Central Arkansas Water is expected to be completed by September. But water won’t run through the pipe until CAW’s $35 million Northbelt transmission line is completed in December 2011.
The Northbelt transmission line will also bring water to Jacksonville and North Pulaski Water Association.
Tim Joyner, who runs Cabot WaterWorks, said this week that the original price of the Northbelt was $42 million, but the bids for that leg of the project have come in lower than expected. Originally, Cabot was supposed to pay about $10 million for its part, but that price will be less. Cabot’s part of the Northbelt is funded by a $10 million loan from the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission.
In the year since the Cabot end of the project started, 10.5 miles of ductile iron pipe has been laid. The pipe from Wal-mart to Hwy. 5 is 24 inches in diameter. The rest is 30 inches. The Cabot line will connect to CAW at Hwy. 107 next to General Samuels Road.
The cost of that $9 million line has been paid entirely by water income which took a sharp rise after rates were increased in 2005.
Currently, Cabot gets its water from a well field between Beebe and Lonoke. Joyner said some residents don’t understand why Cabot is spending so much to connect to another water system when the wells are still producing.
The answer is simple, he said. The Alluvial Aquifer where the wells are located is dropping an average of two feet a year according to tests performed twice a year by the United States Geological Service. And the state, specifically Natural Resources, wants them out of the well field.
“We have it in writing that they want us out by 2023,” Joyner said.
Cabot doesn’t really need water now. But it was always understood that the wells would not be used indefinitely. Farmers didn’t want the well field in their area and in recent years there has been a push to move from ground- water to surface water because of the dropping groundwater level.
Although CAW has assured its partners in the Northbelt that the project will be completed on schedule, work has not resumed on the two 30-inch lines that are supposed to run underneath the I-430 bridge since three workers were killed in April 2008 when a scaffold collapsed.
The men were employed by Oscar Renda Contracting Inc. of Roanoke, Texas, which contracted with CAW in April 2006 to install the pipe under the bridge and across the river.
CAW contracted with the Texas company in April 2006 to install the pipeline under the bridge and across the river.
Joyner said the Arkansas Highway Department has not cleared the company to resume the work.
The Cabot Water and Waste-water Commission met Thursday. A short update to say Cabot’s part of the project was on schedule was part of that meeting, but the commission also discussed a territory dispute with Ward.
When the property where Stagecoach Elementary is located was annexed into Cabot in 2007, the annexation also included an undeveloped wooded area. Sometime later in that same year, Ward filed a service-area plan with Natural Resources that included the wooded area next to the school.
Ward has many water customers inside Cabot limits Cabot WaterWorks provides with sewer. And the water and wastewater commission has said there will be no new sewer customers who don’t also have Cabot water. So if the land is developed with Ward water, it will not have access to Cabot sewer.
The commission argues that the land was already part of Cabot when Ward filed its service area plan with the state and that Cabot should have at least been offered the opportunity to protest that part of the plan.
Ward Mayor Art Brooke stated his city’s position in a letter to the commission dated April 23:
“Municipal annexation does not establish service boundaries in all cases,” Brooke wrote. “It should be noted that this particular property is accessible only from Stagecoach Road where Ward waterlines presently exist. The only available waterline to this parcel for well over 20 years has been Ward water.”
Since Cabot also has a line in the area and the parcel is undeveloped, the commissioners agreed Thursday to ask Natural Resources for a ruling in the matter.
