Local officials say they are receptive to collaboration

CELINA - City officials say they're open to partnering with their neighbors to the east to procure drinking water for both communities after receiving a request from St. Marys Mayor Patrick McGowan.

"I do think we have to plan for the future. I'm not sure this is specifically the way to do it, but it does open up additional discussions on how we can move forward," Celina Mayor Jeff Hazel told council members at Monday night's regular meeting.

Hazel said McGowan recently called him to talk about a potential collaboration between the cities. McGowan also sent Hazel and council members a letter asking them to consider a drinking water partnership as St. Marys "is in the process of upgrading the water system, including a new water treatment facility, well and transmission line."

"He suggested that we kind of come on board with them, and they would supply us water," Hazel said.

Though Celina's drinking water "meets and exceeds every (Ohio Environmental Protection Agency) standard that is currently on the books," it's in the city's best interest to "try to find a good, clean, long-term sustainable water supply," Hazel noted.

McGowan began the letter by mentioning the $8 million grant OEPA recently had awarded to Celina to improve the quality of its drinking water, which is drawn from Grand Lake.

City officials must use the money either to relocate its water treatment facility, partner with another political subdivision to access water sources, establish pipelines to access suitable water resources or treat water to supply drinking water.

"With the timing of the city of St. Marys doing a major upgrade to its water system and the city of Celina pursuing other available sources of supply water, I thought this would be a great opportunity for us to discuss the possibility of the city of Celina partnering with the city of St. Marys for a water source," McGowan wrote.

Celina officials on Monday night agreed they should at least consider such a venture. However, councilman Mike Sovinski stressed that any sense of urgency is with St. Marys' side, not Celina's.

"They're the ones that want to build a plant in the near future," Sovinski said. "We're not looking to have to do anything in the near future. We're looking a little farther than that."

But a partnership is worth considering, especially if it would provide a better and cheaper way of treating drinking water for Celina, Sovinski said. The city spends about $500,000 a year on chemicals to treat the water.

Hazel asked "does this council want to be subject to another community's setting of rates?"

Celina officials said one option for a partnership would be through the creation of a regional water district, a separate entity consisting of representation from both cities.

"I don't know that we would want to buy from any community individually," Hazel said. "It (water district) would certainly have to be very, very fair and a combined effort of the communities involved."

Many other factors must be considered, too, such as a continental divide issue and the construction costs of extending water lines to St. Marys. Hazel said each mile of pipe would probably cost at least $1 million.

"And that's just the pipeline," he said.

Celina met the OEPA grant criteria of being located in both the Lake Erie and Ohio River drainage basins and "subject to the Great Lake-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact."

The compact heavily restricts diversions of water from the Great Lakes watershed. Groundwater cannot be drawn from the watershed unless it eventually is returned as treated effluent. Celina's sewage treatment plant lies south of the continental divide and its discharge flows away from the watershed.

Any city well would likely draw from a strong north-south flow of water that closely follows the ancient Teays River Valley. But the geographic area is limited because of the continental divide issue.

"(St. Marys is) on the Great Lakes Basin side of the international compact. We are on the Gulf of Mexico side. There is nothing easy about that," Hazel said.

City officials in September halted their search for an underground source of drinking water after tests of regional wells detected contamination levels that would be too costly to treat. Some underground swaths of the Teays River were found to be "contaminated from oil wells that were dug back in the 1900s that actually punctured through the Teays," Hazel said.

"They're actually upstream of where all the oil wells were dug," Hazel said about St. Marys' wells. "They don't do a lot of treatment with their well water. It's pretty clean and clear going through there."

"At the end of the day, maybe it does make sense to pay some additional money to treat Teays water on this side, but I, for one, would have to be very confident and assured that it would be even more clean and more pure than what we're getting right now," Hazel continued.

Councilman Jeff Larmore said the city is going to have to tap into the Teays River upstream if it's going to fix its drinking water issue. If that means creating a water district with St. Marys, then so be it, he said.

"I wouldn't care if it's 15 miles, 19 miles. I know other cities pump that far and if it's a $20 million ticket or a $25 million ticket, this decision we're all going to make on this water issue that I've heard all my life living here, we're going to have to go east," Larmore said.