Pawtucket buys water pipes

01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, August 30, 2007

By John Castellucci

Journal Staff Writer

CENTRAL FALLS — Central Falls sold its decaying network of water pipes to the Pawtucket Water Supply Board yesterday, setting off a quiet celebration among Mayor Charles D. Moreau and other officials in City Hall.

But no one was happier than Rick Nievera, a laborer who vividly remembered the winter’s day three-and-a-half years ago that a pipe broke under Broad Street and he and other highway department workers spent 16 hours fixing it in subzero temperatures.

“Thirty-four years I’ve been digging these things up and I’m so glad to see them go,” Nievera said of the pipes that make up the city’s water distribution system.

Now, when a pipe breaks, it will be the Pawtucket Water Supply Board’s responsibility to fix it. “I couldn’t be happier,” Nievera said. “I could dance.”

The PWSB paid $1.1 million for the pipes, acquiring the Central Falls distribution system as part of its effort to improve the quality of drinking water in that city, as well as in Pawtucket and the Valley Falls section of Cumberland.

The multimillion-dollar effort includes the construction of a $46.1-million treatment plant behind PWSB headquarters on Branch Street in Pawtucket, and an aggressive campaign to clean and reline or replace the system’s ancient network of pipes.

Until yesterday, 20 of the 240 miles of pipes in that network belonged to Central Falls, which built its distribution system in 1938.

The PWSB has been trying to acquire the system for nine years, reasoning, as acting PWSB Chief Engineer James L. DeCelles put it, “There’s no sense in making clean water in Pawtucket and putting it through dirty pipes in Central Falls.”

For a long time, the two sides couldn’t agree on price. Central Falls, armed with an appraisal by the engineering firm Sigmund and Associates, wanted $2,950,000. for the water system. In July 2001, when PWSB offered a paltry $851,000, the offer was rejected as “insulting” by Central Falls.

The $1.1-million purchase price was negotiated after the PWSB obtained a $520,400 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, and Central Falls agreed to stop demanding that the agency pay an annual “franchise fee” to use the distribution system.

The Public Utilities Commission allowed the PWSB to continue to collect the revenues from rate payers that had previously gone to pay the franchise fee, ordering that the money be earmarked the purchase of the distribution system, Robert E. Benson, the PWSB chief financial officer said.

By yesterday, the revenues that would ordinarily have gone to pay the franchise fee had climbed to $579,600, supplying the money needed to close the deal.

Moreau praised the deal, saying it will pave the way for a major upgrade of the distribution system.

He said the $1.1 million will be used to help close the gap in the city’s police and fire pension fund that currently stands at $30 million.

“I think it’s a great business decision on our part,” Moreau said. “The quality of water is going to be up to federal standards in 2010.”

Although the city has improved part of its water system, repairing or replacing six miles of pipe, according to DeCelles, it never embarked on the campaign like the one being conducted by the PWSB.

“We could never address water like it should be,” Nievera acknowledged. Pipes were fixed only when they broke, he said.

Now that Central Falls has sold the system, Pawtucket will begin to schedule cleaning and relining or pipe replacement projects in the city.

DeCelles said the work will probably start next year, after the PWSB’s engineering department has had a chance to design the projects and put them out to bid.

He said he isn’t worried about being overwhelmed by Central Falls maintenance issues. Unlike Central Falls, which had to rely on its already busy highway department to maintain and repair the pipes, the PWSB has a transmission and distribution department, with a dozen or so workers available to fix water mains whenever they break.

The agency also has an eight-person engineering staff that DeCelles said has been studying the Central Falls water system.

For the past couple of months, Fred Ramos, water engineering project manager, and Richard Antonelli, engineering manager, have been conferring with Central Falls officials and obtaining water utility plans and service cards, according to DeCelles

“They have a pretty good handle on the Central Falls system. They’ve been doing research,” he said.