MORGANTOWN — According to communication between the Morgantown Utility Board and the city of Morgantown, MUB intends to end negotiations regarding a planned water line through White Park if the parties cannot reach an agreement by Nov. 1.
The line is needed to bring water from the George B. Flegal Dam & Reservoir — an emergency, secondary water source currently under construction along Cobun Creek — to the utility’s treatment facility on Don Knotts Boulevard.
Negotiations on a licensing agreement that would allow the utility to access the park have continued despite MUB’s unanimous vote on Oct. 14 to withdraw its interest in White Park and instead build a pumping station and run the 30-inch pipeline below Mississippi Street and around the park.
MUB Chairman J.T. Straface explained that despite more than four months of public discourse and closed-door negotiations between MUB, the city and BOPARC, consensus “is beyond any reasonable reach.”
He cited three deal-breakers for the utility.
The city’s insistence on language allowing it to order the proposed $3 million pipeline be removed at any time, for any reason, at MUB’s expense.
BOPARC’s demand for payment of replacement value of trees estimated at more than $1 million in addition to MUB’s pledge to plant two trees for every one removed during pipeline construction.
BOPARC’s demand that MUB not just allow, but build at its expense, recreational features at the new Flegal Reservoir.
In the latest back-and-forth between the parties, MUB General Manager Tim Ball explains that MUB is ready to cut off negotiations and move ahead with the Mississippi Street route and pumping station — Route 5/5a — despite the face that it will add an estimated $6.43 million in additional costs.
As Route 3 is the shortest of the available options and would be gravity fed, it would add about $800,000 to the $2.1 million budgeted for the water line.
Ball points out in an email to City Manager Paul Brake that a provision allowing the City to order relocation or abandonment of the pipeline without cause and at MUB’s expense remains in the city’s latest offer, making it a non-starter.
“This is a simple matter. MUB refuses to accept the risk of building the pipeline now, and then having to build it yet again sometime in the future at our own expense,” Ball writes. “We have painstakingly vetted Route 3, and we have tentatively agreed to pay handsomely (with well-documented concessions) for that privilege.”
The concessions referenced include MUB’s commitment to replant two trees for every one removed during construction as well as the construction of a new walking trail and connected foot bridge.
The latest offer presented by the City/BOPARC does remove the insistence that MUB pay the replacement value of impacted trees.
This issue has been ongoing since April, when public backlash forced MUB to halt work on its original path through the park due to the impact it would have on the public space and hundreds of its mature trees.
Ultimately, MUB, Morgantown City Council and BOPARC all voted to approve Route 3. This choice, tweaked multiple times along the way, was the result of months of public discussion and at least eight public meetings.
Now, Ball writes, the utility is ready to cut its losses and move forward with the water line.
“While MUB remains willing to continue the pursuit of resolution of the differences described above, we remain concerned that the differences remain so far apart that successful conclusion of these negotiations is unlikely,” Ball explains, before setting the Nov. 1 deadline.
He notes that even if the parties can reach an agreement on Route 3, doing so after Nov. 1 would likely delay completion of the water line to fall or winter of 2020.
The new reservoir and pipeline is a roughly $50 million project. It’s being funded through water and sewer rate increases that took effect in July 2016.
