Sewer negotiations expected

Published 7:52 pm Saturday, February 8, 2014

Washington’s City Council, during its meeting Monday, will consider authorizing City Manager Brian Alligood to negotiate a sewer-capacity agreement with the Town of Chocowinity.

Chocowinity wants to purchase an additional capacity if 8,450 gallons per day so it can better serve the rest area to be built along U.S. Highway 17 south of the town, according to a memorandum from Allen Lewis, the city’s public-works director, to the mayor and council. Under the current agreement between the city and town, the town pays $10 per gallon of capacity. The rest area will be in the town’s extraterritorial jurisdiction but not in the town limits.

Last month, the council instructed Alligood and city staff to work with Chocowinity officials to determine the town’s future sewer needs inside the town limits and outside those limits so the city can better determine how Chocowinity’s future sewer needs could affect the city’s wastewater-treatment system.

Chocowinity pays the city for sewer capacity in the city’s wastewater removal system and to treat the town’s sewage at the city’s sewage-treatment plant. Under state law, once a municipality’s wastewater-treatment system reaches 80-percent capacity, it must start designing a new system or an expansion of the existing system. Once that system reaches 90-percent capacity, the municipality must build a new system or expand the existing system, according to state law.

Currently, the city’s system is at 60-percent capacity, according to Lewis.

 

About Mike Voss

Mike Voss is the contributing editor at the Washington Daily News. He has a daughter and four grandchildren. Except for nearly six years he worked at the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va., in the early to mid-1990s, he has been at the Daily News since April 1986.
Journalism awards:
• Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service, 1990.
• Society of Professional Journalists: Sigma Delta Chi Award, Bronze Medallion.
• Associated Press Managing Editors’ Public Service Award.
• Investigative Reporters & Editors’ Award.
• North Carolina Press Association, First Place, Public Service Award, 1989.
• North Carolina Press Association, Second Place, Investigative Reporting, 1990.
All those were for the articles he and Betty Gray wrote about the city’s contaminated water system in 1989-1990.
• North Carolina Press Association, First Place, Investigative Reporting, 1991.
• North Carolina Press Association, Third Place, General News Reporting, 2005.
• North Carolina Press Association, Second Place, Lighter Columns, 2006.
Recently learned he will receive another award.
• North Carolina Press Association, First Place, Lighter Columns, 2010.
4. Lectured at or served on seminar panels at journalism schools at UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Maryland, Columbia University, Mary Washington University and Francis Marion University.

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