It's Not Just Our Water Source, as Simple as a Water Filter Nor Our Only Issue!
Water is not our only issue, we have many needs that our team has been focused on. Drainage, roads, sidewalks and water. We need to focus on all of these issues and different areas of our community have different needs with respect to these issues.
The Miller Woods area has drainage issues. Steger west of State Street has sidewalk and water concerns. All areas of Steger has road issues. Our opponents seem focused on just water problems and they think the best way to fix it is to give residents filters. To us, this is very short sighted. We also want our opponents to explain how the Village can use public funds to purchase filters for homes. Our opponents fail to realize we are not a home rule community. Our opponents clearly do not understand what the law allows us to do or prohibits us from doing. We have a plan that complies with the law and one we can actually implement.
We believe that to fix our water issues, we need to (i) loop our dead ends, (ii) add automatic flushing stations, and (iii) replace our water mains. We also can talk about our water source as a community, but until we accomplish these three things, no matter what water source we put into our system, it will still have rust and iron in it because it comes from our aging pipes.
It costs approximately, $1,000,000 per mile to replace a water main. We have around 35 miles of main. It costs around $300,000 to replace a block of road. If we replace a main when we replace a road, we cut these costs down. Therefore, we need to tie our water main replacement to our road repair and drainage work. Replacing all of our mains will not happen overnight, but we must spend the money to solve this problem. We also will be installing automatic flushing stations so that we have our mains flushed regularly. These stations do not impact the water system like opening and closing fire hydrants which are more likely to cause main breaks.
We also want to address our opponents statement that we have received over a million dollars in our water fund and therefore have a lot of money to spend on our system. What they failed to state is the expenses which are also millions of dollars. That said, we have been awarded grants so as soon as we receive these funds, we will be making improvements.
As for the water source, we have been working to understand the cost of switching to Lake Michigan water. We have also been working to understand the cost of switching to water treated by a water treatment plant from a neighboring community. We also have had conversations with Crete to get information on their experience with filters at each towers. During all of these conversations, it did become pretty clear that no matter the water source, we need to replace our aging mains.
We know this has taken some time for us to get to this point where we can start taking action, but we needed to make sure that we did not do anything to our water source or system that would risk the health of our residents. We have seen other communities handle this incorrectly and now have serious issues. We are not going to be that town under our leadership.
Ken, Joe, Ernie, Lenny and Ryan have a real plan and have been awarded grants we will begin receiving in 2021 that will provide the money to implement it. We also will protect your health and the safety of our water.