WESTOVER — A third and final reading of a 36.67% increase in the city’s sewer rates cleared Westover City Council Monday.
Customers will begin seeing the higher rates reflected in sewer bills after May 30.
The increased sewer revenues are part of the city’s financing plan for the long-awaited Holland Avenue work as well as replacement of the city’s main pump station, which delivers all Westover’s sanitary sewer flow beneath the Monongahela River to join the MUB system.
The two projects have a total combined cost of $8.25 million.
During Monday’s meeting, Engineer Doug Smith said the first of the projects, replacing stormwater and sewer lines beneath about 2,000 feet of Holland Avenue, is on pace to go out for bids in the next month or so.
But there remains some concern about what the West Virginia Division of Highways intends to do to the roadway surface once that project is complete.
Smith said the DOH is not going to provide anything in writing committing to resurfacing the road in 2025, though he does believe that to be the state’s intent.
“They just have not decided as to what capacity that’s going to be, whether that’s an overlay or a full body replacement of the street,” he said.
Separate of the DOH’s plans, Smith said there is money in the project budget to put an overlay surface on the street.
It remains unknown whether the DOH will tear that overlay out and redo it as part of a larger resurfacing project.
Smith said he believes there needs to be some mitigation against the amount of heavy truck traffic traveling the route as part of the DOH’s plans.
“If [DOH] come in and simply does a base course and an overlay, we should have some conversation if that is their plan because as you can see, that particular model of road paving has not worked over the years,” he said.
City Attorney Tim Stranko called that “the nightmare scenario.”
“So, the nightmare scenario is we fix perfectly all the underground facilities, but the roadway may not work correctly anyway depending on what the DOH decides to do,” he said.
In other news from Monday’s meeting, Westover Council voted to provide $1,000 to the Westwood Middle School Sci-Biotics group.
