Cynicallous

A light, airy, effervescent, blog of grave consequence. (NOT!) Dedicated to those of us who must respond to negative stimuli by Chernobyling (entombing in concrete) our innermost thoughts.

Name:
Location: Slaughter, Louisiana, United States

A semi-gruntled corporate reliability engineer trying to make ends meet while keeping my wife happy, and myself out of the asylum.

Monday, July 16, 2007

Oh, small town politics....

Our lovely little hamlet of Slaughter, Louisiana has a small water problem. Not with quality, as the town's water supply is rigorously tested monthly and has never had a bad test, but with quantity.

The town (population right around 1000), has a 2000' deep drilled water well. This well was installed in 1957. It was originally built as an iron liner at 6" diameter. Recently, because the liner has eroded, they have had to sleeve the well with PVC down to 4" and because of shifting geology over the last 50 years, they were unable to sleeve the deepest 200'. This now results in super-minor discoloration of our water (that personally, I've never even noticed) from sediment leaching through the old liner.

We just had a town meeting to discuss the installation of a new well. The new well will be 12" diameter into the same aquifer and will be able to supply twice the volume of the current failing well for future town expansion.

Sparing you the actual numbers, this new well is going to result in an increase in each household's water bill of about, get ready for it, are you sitting down, nine dollars per month. (Twenty on the high side.)

Most of the people at the meeting were receptive to the idea as they realize that no one wants to do this, but it MUST be done to secure the viability of not only the town's drinking water, but also its fire supression supply. Some of the older coots, however, were rather nasty about the whole affair. Even going so far as to state that the current administrators of the town will be responsible for a mass exodus over the increased costs.

I actually had to stifle a guffaw when that came up.

$9/month. The mayor actually seemed choked up while addressing the lower-income people or fixed income residents as this is actually a potential 30% increase in our water charges.

If anyone chooses to leave town because their water bill is too high, I hereby submit to purchase their property at a semi-reasonable rate. Property values must be down, ya know? Taxes just went up.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Come on! Don't be so tough on those old coots. Just buy up a nice property for Sweet Pea and Puppy's Pop.

10:01 AM  

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