Water is a valuable public asset which should be available to all, not sold to the highest bidder to exploit for profits.
The Discovery Of The Trucking Complaint
Introduction
As a result of Aqua’s rate increase effective May-2022 most New Garden customers saw their sewer bills go up dramatically. Since our billing is quarterly, that increase was not seen until September-2022. When those bills were received, customers were shocked and outraged. A lot of heat was put on the New Garden Township Board of Supervisors to explain what happened. They finally agreed to hold a special Board meeting on 11/21/2022 to address the issue. This is off the topic of my complaints, but here is the story of that meeting: LINK.
Aqua made three different presentations during that meeting. One was Mr. Todd Duerr, Aqua’s Operations Manager. Part of his presentation was about activating an unused pipeline to replace trucking. The short story was that trucking was eliminated before year end 2021. That revelation led to my trucking complaint.
The meeting was video recorded by a member of the audience. Here is the excerpt of Mr. Duerr talking about the pipeline: LINK
My transcript of Mr. Duerr’s remarks about activating that pipeline follows.
Transcript of what Mr. Duerr said about the pipeline:
“If you look at the far right of the picture [slide showing a map] with the red squiggly line on there when this system was built there was a thought that this water could be used to irrigate other areas of the Township. Now it never came to fruition but somebody put in a 10,000, 11,000-foot pipeline, which is represented there [pointing to the map]. So we found out about this. The engineers and operations team got with some of the Township folks and they …they plotted this line out. We really did not know where it was. They had to go out and find it. Then we didn’t know if it was going to hold water. It has to hold water under pressure. So, they spent the better part of eight months while we were pumping and hauling to find the line, fix … fix damaged portions of the line – it hadn’t been used ever - and make it … make it water-tight. And when they did that, that pumping and hauling that was costing a million dollars a year stopped immediately. Because they were able to stand up pump stations connect that pump up to the pipeline there and pump the water to the East End and Kennett Square Borough. So that eliminated that ongoing cost right away. That … that was done within the first year of operation.”
The Full Meeting Video
This meeting was held in an elementary school cafeteria to hold the crowd that showed up. Three different recordings of the meeting were made:
#1 - A local journalist made an audio recording of the entire meeting.
#2 - I made an audio recording of the entire meeting – and have preserved it.
#3 - A Food And Water Watch employee sat in the front row and used an I Phone to make a video record of the meeting in three segments.
The video recordings were posted on Facebook for almost three years. Then, without warning, Facebook took them down. However, I did make MP4 backup copies of those videos. From those copies I was able to post the clip of Mr. Duerr’s presentation. Unfortunately, those files total over 11 gigabytes. That makes it difficult to provide general access to those videos.