CORNELIA — Members of the Cornelia Water and Sewerage Authority got an updated look recently at construction work on the site of the new water treatment plant and reservoir on Camp Creek Road.
Following a brief authority meeting in the onsite office, authority members joined engineer Marty Boyd to tour the front portion of the jobsite.
Recent heavy rains have made much of the jobsite too muddy to traverse without boots.
Still, authority members were able to get an overview of the ongoing work.
Authority Chairman Don Bagwell, who also serves as Ward 3 commissioner for the city, was one of those who got a look at the ongoing work on the four-million-gallon/day water treatment plant and 76-million-gallon raw water reservoir.
“It’s exciting to see the progress that we’re making,” Bagwell said. “I think people sometimes have this idea that government projects always get bogged down and run terribly over budget and don’t meet the expectations on the front end, but this is really moving along well.”
The facilities tour had been postponed a couple of times due to inclement weather, including heavy rainfall and resulting muddy conditions that slowed construction progress.
“We’ve had some delays here, of course, because of weather, and we’re in the process of trying to overcome those things,” Bagwell said. “It’s delayed us a bit in our final, but the good thing is we’re over a quarter-million dollars under budget, which is pretty exciting. This is not a situation you usually find with projects.”
Reservoir, replacement plant project the 'most important thing'
Cornelia leaders say spending the money to replace the aging water treatment plant and build a new reservoir is crucial to the city and the portion of Habersham County it serves with water.
“I think we’re all dedicated to the idea that this is the most important thing that we, as a commission and as a city administration, will do during our term here, so I think we’re all excited that we’re poised for the future now that this project is being put together and completed according to the state of the art, and I’m always fond of telling citizens that if all we do is bring good, clean water to people and take care of sewage, then we probably have done 95 percent of the important work that we were elected to do, so this is a high priority for us and it’s exciting to see it come along like it is,” Bagwell said.
Heavy rain, mud on the site, and an adjustment to the location of the raw water pump station on site all have contributed to delays in the tentative completion date to the end of the first quarter of 2019.
“I think the prediction is right around March it will all be done, and we’ll be sitting in a much better situation for potential drought and water problems in the future, because we’ll have this wonderful new reservoir that we can depend on. And, of course, we’ll be able to have the resources of our old reservoir in addition to that, so we should be fairly well set, depending on what growth happens real estate-wise in the next 20 or 30 years.”
