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Town Council, Water Board End Tiff Over Well Money

Posted on: Tuesday, 26 July 2005, 15:00 CDT

Jul. 26--NORTH SMITHFIELD -- Well, they communicated. And maybe that was the problem.

Over two-and-a-half hours of a joint meeting of the Town Council and the Water Authority, where practically every speaker at one time or another said "with all due respect," members of the town's Water Authority left saying they weren't sure they'd gotten any.

The meeting, called by Town Council President David Lovett to clear the air between the feuding boards, ended with the authority members speculating that they may just stop meeting.

"I really don't have a comment because I don't know where we go from here," authority member Alan R. Brodd said after the meeting.

The meeting had been contentious at times, but Lovett said near the end it seemed that a compromise was possible, until the council stuck to a demand made in April that the authority turn over any town funds in its control to the town.

The authority members resisted that instruction, saying the money had been appropriated to the panel by a previous council with the instructions that the authority oversees the completion of a new Tifft Road well.

"We feel we have a fiduciary responsibility to see that through," authority member M. Douglas Fay said.

A few minutes later though, he had changed his mind and moved to turn over any money to the town.

"The Tifft Road well is not going to go in," he said as he made the motion.

After a 3-to-0 vote to give the money to the town, with two abstentions by the five authority members, Fay looked to the council members and said, "You sell it, make it happen. You've got to do it now."

Councilman Edward Yazbak said the insistence that the money be returned was not meant to be a rejection of the authority, but a desire by the council to see more progress, faster, on the Tifft Road well project.

The new Tifft Road well is important to the town's water system. It has a well there now, which generates more than half the system's water, but its output has been declining over the years.

Brodd said the authority has obtained a state permit to drill the well and work on that part of the project could begin in days. The hang-up is the needed easements to prevent unwanted development within 400 feet of the well, and state permission for the required monitoring wells has not been obtained.

The authority felt strongly about the money issue, Brodd said, because it was money that enabled the panel to function. Without funds, it would be unable to hire the engineers and lawyers it needs to do its work, he said.

And with a membership of lawyers and engineers -- two members run water systems in other Rhode Island municipalities -- Brodd said the authority was the best-qualified group to continue that work.

Drilling a new well near the old one has been a priority for several years and council members said it was frustration over what they felt was too slow a pace that prompted them to act.

Yazbak quoted a letter from February 2003 in which the authority described the project as "90 percent there" and predicted it would be on line by the end of that year.

"It's two years later and we're no closer," Yazbak said.

But then Fay said part of the reason for that was the authority had expected money from the council that it didn't get until November of that year.

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Source: Providence Journal

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