T-burg considers selling extra water

For 34 years, Bill Fisher and his family have been taking cold showers, going to laundromats and rationing what water they can get from the well at their Covert home. Through the depths of winter and the driest of droughts, the Fisher family’s access to water has been determined by the level of their well.

“Everyone I know in the town of Covert struggles with water,” Fisher said. “There’s times that we’ve run out of water for a couple months at a time, and we’ve had to make sacrifices and figure out what to do. … We’ll literally have to take a cold shower because you waste so much water waiting for it to run through the pipes.”

Three miles down the road from Covert, Trumansburg’s reliable, pump-based water infrastructure can pump far more water than the amount the town’s residents use. With the Trumansburg village government floating the idea of selling surplus water to homes outside of the village, the Fisher household may have found hope of getting a dependable source of water.

When a Trumansburg resident turns on their water, a pipe system beginning at multiple pumps near Cayuga Lake pulls water from a deep, large aquifer up the hill, through the village, into their home and out of their tap. Ben Darfler, a village trustee, said that in addition to the quality of the town’s water, improvements to water infrastructure have made water capacity outperform residential demand.

“Now, we have at least four times the capacity that we need for the village,” Darfler said. “It does put us in a place where we have a very large abundance of water capacity, well beyond what we actually use as a village. That brings us into conversations of what we would want to do with it and if we look to sell it.”

Having water infrastructure as effective as Trumansburg’s is rare. In the rest of semi-rural America, stories like Fisher’s are much more common, as the country’s investments in its water systems have deteriorated over the years (tinyurl.com/23vge3q9) — the American Society of Civil Engineers gives America’s water infrastructure a C- grade (tinyurl.com/2ae9bow2).

However, through a combination of loans and bonds, Trumansburg was able to make significant investments in its water system. Darfler said the village government has discussed selling water to homes surrounding the village not just to put surplus water to use, but also to pay off related debt.

Michael Boggs is an energy manager at Cornell University and a member of the Ulysses Town Council. Boggs said by selling water to areas outside of Trumansburg, the village could lower the cost of bills for its residents.

“The marginal cost to make another unit of water is very low; it’s just treatment costs and a little bit of electricity,” Boggs said. “The more units you can sell, that theoretically reduces the cost per unit.”

Boggs said that in order to expand water services to places like Fisher’s home, the village would have to undergo multiple legal and manufacturing processes. Additionally, a new water district would need to be created to serve those living outside of the village, which would need to be approved in a vote by people whose neighborhoods the new pipes could cut through. Boggs said this process could take years.

Michael Reynolds, the town supervisor of Covert, said that while campaigning in his town, water access was a common issue for residents.

“I’d go door to door to every house and I’d ask residents then, ‘What are your needs with water?’” Reynolds said. “It was 50-50. A family with a husband and wife with three to four kids were always looking for more water. But an elderly couple [would say], ‘We got lots. We don’t need any more.’”

For years, Fisher had to use his well for his family of five and the horses that he owned. Now that his three children have moved out and he no longer has horses, he and his wife have an easier time getting water. However, Fisher’s well gives him hard water, which has high amounts of calcium and magnesium in it.

While there are no health risks to hard water, it causes mineral buildup on pipes and can be irritating to skin. Fisher said getting access to Trumansburg’s water would be a major improvement for his family.

“It’d be a huge burden lifted,” Fisher said. “We wouldn’t have to worry about where our water’s coming from, how much rain we’re gonna get — all summer long during a drought we’ll be praying for water. Life would be a lot easier.”

Trumansburg Connection appears every Wednesday in Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to editorial@VizellaMedia.com.