Town agrees to amended water supply agreement
By LAURA THORNBURG
Staff
During a Dec. 18 special called meeting, the members of the Sparta Town Council approved an amendment to the regional water agreement, which would allow the project to move forward with receiving project funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Office of Rural Development. The Alleghany County Board of Commissioners approved the same agreement at their meeting Monday night.
At the town meeting, Town Manager Bryan Edwards, who also serves as the chairman of the Virginia-Carolina Regional Water Authority Board, started the meeting with an update on the authority's progress thus far.
Edwards commented, "We had a meeting last Thursday (Dec. 10) and we're moving forward very well with plans to close with USDA Rural Development as early in January as we can get all the documents pulled together. Our attorney for the water authority is putting together the package—in fact, that package has been delivered, it was delivered to the regional office in Wytheville (Va.) and they are in the process of reviewing that."
Edwards went on to say, "One of the items that USDA has basically mandated that our agreement address how we deal with a water shortage in the event that the facility could not produce the amount of water—one million gallons a day—that's projected. They want us to have in our agreement how we would deal with a drought or water shortage. The probability of that is extremely slim but it's just part of the protocol that they want to see…"
Edwards noted that the agreement addresses the operations of the water authority in any situation in which the regional facility is unable to operate at its total range of capacity of one million gallons a day due to droughts, water shortages or other reasons beyond the control of the authority.
If a deficit occurs, Edwards said that the allocated capacity of the participants would be reduced based on the amount of production capacity reduction resulting from the deficit.
Edwards concluded, "If we had to make an adjustment it would be done on a pro rata basis…"
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