Residents to see water bill reduction
Residents who live on Route 19 and Route 221 north of Ruff Creek in Washington Township will soon see a reduction in their monthly water bills.
The township supervisors earlier agreed to pay off a portion of the debt that was incurred to construct water lines on the two roads in 2012, which will reduce the debt service fee residents on the lines pay each month.
The $100,000 payment, which the township funded with Act 13 impact fee money, will reduce the residents’ debt service payment from $22.69 to $11.42 a month, Supervisor Walter Stout said.
The reduction is expected to be included in the residents’ Southwestern Pennsylvania Water Authority bills that will be mailed this month. Fifty-two authority customers live along the two roads in the township.
Stout said the idea of reducing the debt service payments has been discussed since he took office in January 2016. In August, he and Supervisors Correan Stewart and Troy Smith voted to begin discussions with the water authority about reducing the debt.
“Basically, it was an issue of fairness,” Stout said.
Construction of water lines on the two roads was funded partly with state grant and loan money. To help pay off the 20-year state loan on the project, residents served by the lines were asked to pay a monthly fee to cover the debt service costs.
An earlier project that extended water lines to township residents along the two roads south of Ruff Creek had not required residents to pay a debt service fee or a tap-in fee, Stout said. Grant money had covered those costs.
The residents south of Ruff Creek received public service “no strings attached,” Stout said. “We felt in order to be fair to the residents (on Route 19 and 221), we would use a portion of the township’s impact fee money to help pay down the loan.”
The township has received about $518,000 in impact fee money in each of the last two years.
The supervisors also agreed recently to contribute $100,000 of Act 13 money to the extension of a water line on Route 18 from Waynesburg to Nineveh. The line will provide public water to Washington Township residents in the Sycamore area.