Mount Olive gets $1.5 million grant
By Steve Herring
Published in News on December 15, 2014 1:46 PM
MOUNT OLIVE -- A nearly $1.5 million grant has been awarded to Mount Olive for water and sewer improvements on Williamson, Kelly and Fleer streets.
The project is expected to reduce unaccounted for water loss and also to increase water volume and fire protection capability, Town Manager Charles Brown said.
The official announcement made Thursday brings to a total of $3,475,797 in grants, and another $512,000 in a low-interest loan, that the town has received over the past few months for water and sewer improvement projects.
Once all three projects are completed, the town will be in "really good shape" in terms of its water and sewer systems, Brown said.
The $1,476,279 grant is a federal Community Development Block Grant.
The town had earlier received a $1,509,818 CDBG grant for the replacement of sewer pump stations on County Road, Church Street, Cleveland Drive and Franklin Street.
Both of those projects are 100 percent grant funded.
Mount Olive also has received a $489,700 U.S. Department of Agriculture grant and $512,000 USDA low-interest loan.
That funding will be used to upgrade approximately 6,860 feet of sewer force main from 4 inches to 6 inches from the existing Boling Chair lift station on Northeast Church Road to a 15-inch gravity sewer off Tillman Street and the replacement of two sewer lift stations on Valley Road and on Ridgecrest Drive.
"The USDA, we approved at the last board meeting, so we knew that was good," Brown said. "The pump station funding we knew that was done. That was the $1.509 million. But we had applied for the water portion, and we didn't get it the first go-around.
"But now we have confirmed that we have been approved. We are on the list of approved municipalities for the second round of funding on that."
The USDA project will also include the purchase of a trailer-mounted diesel driven sewer line jetter used to clean the lines and a sewer and storm drain inspection camera with video recording capability.
With the equipment town will be capable of meeting state Department of Environment and Natural Resources requirements to inspect and clean 10 percent of its sewer lines annually (approximately 3 miles).
The USDA lift station project on Northeast Church road is a "big deal," Brown said.
"Right now we are at the design capacity for that lift station," he said. "If an industry were to come, we wouldn't have the sewer capacity. This will increase it from 216,000 gallons a day to right at a million gallons a day."
One of the driving forces for the project has been the expansion of the Mt. Olive Pickle Co. Distribution Center on the Old Mount Olive Highway that will add two new production lines and another 175 jobs.
"That discharge brings us to the design capacity of that lift station," Brown said. "This will fix that."
Once all of the work is completed, all of the town's 13 lift stations will either be new or newly rehabbed.
"They will have telemetry," Brown said. "They will have generators. That was a huge problem before. If the power went out, and the wet well filled up and there wasn't anything to pump it out, it is going spill. Now we will have generators at all lift station locations."
All of these projects are important steps as Mount Olive continues to upgrade its infrastructure, particularly in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods, he said.
"We will have made a tremendous impact on that system and probably that is good thing because we have been very lucky with being able to secure this funding," Brown said. "I don't much think that is going to continue in the same vein has it has been for very much longer.
"I just don't think the money is out there. You stop and look ,the highway department doesn't have any money. DOT, they are out of money. So I just don't think you are going to see much more of this kind of funding. So we are very lucky."
It will be mid-2015 before any of the projects will start.
The biggest holdup will be getting the grant agreements through the "legal entanglements," Brown said. It is lengthy process for the CD grants, he said.
"During the course of this year we either have already spent, or gotten approved for roughly $9 million in funding for infrastructure, including the airport runway," Brown said.
Approximately $3 million of nearly $4 million received in the most recent round of funding will be spent in the southeast quadrant of town.
"There is more work to do, but with the purchase of this sewer line equipment, the camera and the jetter, that will enable us to do a lot of that work ourselves," Brown said. "It's going to be an ongoing maintenance problem, but really our water and sewer systems, our police fleet, our vehicles in public works -- we are really in as good a shape as this town has ever been in.
"That is just the facts. We got a letter from the Local Government Commission complimenting us on our fund balance for the last audited year that we had. You have seen all of the improvements over at Steele Memorial Library, the parking lot, the Veterans Memorial. We are currently working on the Housing Authority building to restore that and stabilize it. But there will always be things to do on the water/sewer system."
Brown said that Mayor Ray McDonald Sr., the town board, administrative staff and public utility personnel are to be commended for time and effort spent preparing for these important projects.