Milledgeville's water crisis resolution plans won't splash back for quite a while
MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga. (WGXA) -- The city of Milledgeville is making some headway in solving the water crisis that has left people without running water for days at a time, many times. However, it's not going to be a quick fix.
City council members unanimously approved a proposed engineering agreement on Tuesday to update the water treatment facility, but it's going to take some time. City council member Walter Reynolds hopes a construction agreement can be passed around this time next year.
Milledgeville is planning to upgrade the existing water treatment facility which should allow them to expand capacity and increase reliability.
The city has had twenty years of water infrastructure issues, leaving people in Milledgeville out to dry.
During the past six years, repeated water outages have affected the lives and businesses of people within the city. Local hotel manager, Pamela Jackson, General Manager of the Fairfield Inn, says the hotel's losses due to water outages extend far beyond a few days without water. She said with the start of the project so far in the future, she's concerned the problems will boil over again. Jackson said the outages are detrimental to tourism in Milledgeville, costing the Fairfield Inn around $40,000 in lost revenue during the last water shutoff.
"They are trying to go forward with this, but this is only going to fix the treatment plant, it's not going to fix the pipes, and it's years in the making, which means business owners need to get a set game plan of what they're going to do when this happens again," said Jackson. "There's so many moving parts here so it (doesn't) affect just, 'hey, you don't have any water'.
She says it hurt their reputation with guests.
"People didn't want to hear that the city is in trouble. All they knew is they were at a hotel, and they would stand there and scream 'We need water'."
And when angry customers leave bad reviews, even when problems aren't any fault of hotel staff, she said it hurts business further downstream.
"Our linen, so we couldn't wash clothes even when the water came on because the brown water was coming through, so we had linen we couldn't wash, and the first loads we did wash; it was brown."
The project is expected to cost $80 million. However, if the city had followed through on plans that were on the table back in 2020, that price tag would have cost roughly only $40 million. Council member, Walter Reynolds says part of the project funding will mean water and sewer rate increases but says those increases will also allow the city to designate 1 million dollars a year for distribution improvements and repair. He says $1 million is set aside for the upgrades in the newest SPLOST referendum.
