The township is under a consent order from the Department of Environmental Protection to commence construction by January 1, 2019.
Moorestown Township has found itself in a bit of a time crunch as it moves forward with upgrades to its water treatment facilities. At a recent council meeting, two ordinances appropriating more than $30 million in bonds for the proposed upgrades were passed on first reading before receiving bids back from potential vendors.
Township Manager Thomas Neff said, at this point, these costs are only estimates.
“At the end of the day, we expect this to be considerably less, but we won’t know until bids come in on Dec. 5, and then will have a public hearing afterwards,” Neff said.
Resident Paul Conlow asked why the township was bonding before receiving the bids back. Neff explained that while the township would ordinarily wait until the bids came in to see how much is truly needed, the township is under a consent order from the state Department of Environmental Protection to commence construction by Jan. 1.
He said if they waited until after Dec. 5 to introduce ordinance, they would still have to wait 10 days to schedule a public hearing, which would would be difficult to coordinate so close to the holidays.
“We’re moving forward as quickly as we can, but with appropriate safeguards in place,” Neff said.
Neff said their hope is the actual cost will be far less, and they can come back and cancel a portion of the bonding authorization that isn’t needed.
Delays from DEP also contributed to the rushed timeline. The township needed a letter from DEP authorizing it to go out to bid, which it received at the end of October. Mayor Stacey Jordan said they were expecting to get these approvals back in August or September.
Councilman Michael Locatell explained one of the reasons for the delays. He said while they were in the design stage of discussing the treatment for North Church, they found trace elements 1,4-Dioxane in the water. He said while DEP does not currently require any sort of filtration for 1,4-Dioxane, they decided to “get ahead of it.” He said because Moorestown will be the first municipality in the state to filter for the contaminant, DEP took longer to approve the design process, but the additional filtering increased the cost of the project.
“I like the idea that we’re in front of it this time instead of chasing the problem,” Locatell said of the filtering.
Neff said the township has been “aggressively pursuing” funding from the DEP. He said one particular program provides low-interest loans in support of water treatment plants like this.
He said they don’t know if they’ll receive assistance until March, but they can probably expect to get assistance for at least one of the plants.
The next meeting of Moorestown Township Council will take place on Monday, Dec. 10, at 7:30 p.m. in Town Hall.
