At the first meeting of the Village of Parks council held in the new city hall building, Mayor Kevin Kately and the council mostly focused on the Village’s all-important water system.
In a community with a population under 1,000, the water system is one of the largest in the parish, serving 4,200 customers with about 180 miles of lines. Village operations are essentially supported by water system revenues but the unavoidable fact is that most of the system’s infrastructure is approaching 60 years of age.
At Kately’s invitation,
representatives from the USDA’s Department of Rural Development Acting Director Lee Jones, and Community Programs Director Tony Matlock, addressed the council at the Oct. 8 meeting, on the realities the Village will face when it comes time to upgrade and modernize the system.
Jones and Matlock oversee the federal programs that can provide help with distressed rural water systems. They made it clear that there is little hope for outright grants in the circumstances facing the village. Full grants are only made available to communities with relatively few customers and failing, unsafe systems.
A community like Parks, Jones said, can expect some grant funding from the state for a small percentage of the total costs of the needed work, and the USDA provides aid in securing those grants. But the bulk of funding provided under the USDA Rural Development programs are bond-secured loans.
To judge qualification for those loans, analysts take into account factors such as a municipality’s financial condition, which is currently quite good in the case of the Village; the cost of needed repairs and upgrades, which is estimated to be at least $8 million in this case; and the system’s rate structure, which, Matlock said, is where the Village gets into a bit of trouble.
“This is always an uncomfortable discussion,” he commented, “but the board that makes these decisions likes to see rates in the $30-$50 per month range, or about 1.5 percent of average customer income.”
However, Matlock continued, a factor in the Village’s favor is that the mayor is a certified water system operator.
Kately said, “We are not going to be having any sudden rate hikes,
but we need to continue
to bring them up a little every year. I could probably just put it off until there is another mayor up here to take the heat,
but that is not what we’re here for. We are going to face the facts that we have in front of us.”
He continued, “It will be much more of a shock if we don’t take care of business and the system goes out altogether, the pressure becomes low, or the water turns to sludge. We need to stay ahead of things.”
The area Parks Water serves is growing in population and the system will soon reach its limits. The Village water rates are the lowest in the area and will continue to be low, Kately said, but they will have to provide enough resources to secure the future of the system.
