FAYETTEVILLE — Washington County officials say phase two of the Southeast Water Project will deliver running water to 100 more people than expected after pressure and purity testing is completed sometime in the next few months.

The Washington Water Authority will receive about $3,300 more in monthly payments than planned with 411 customers signed up instead of the anticipated 300. The extra money won’t be used to expand the project, meaning residents on dozens of streets in the county’s southeast corner will remain dependent on wells and hauled water.

“There’s not additional loans available,” said Josh Moore, the authority’s general manager. “Our pot of money, it’s out. It doesn’t make good business sense.”

The project is the second phase of a wider initiative, in the works for years and frequently delayed by geography and weather, to bring public water to unincorporated communities such as Wyola and Hazel Valley.

It’s paid for with almost $8 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission, as well as a $1.25 million loan from the Agriculture Department.

Moore said the boost in customers will help pay the $5,000 monthly payment on that loan. Revenue from monthly bills for the 411 customers — about $30 each — will more than cover the debt payment.

“You’re spreading the cost of (operations and maintenance) and the debt service,” Moore said, adding the prediction of 300 users came from surveys before construction began. “Now with more customers, we’re able to just have more revenue we can put back into the system for upgrades in the future.”

Such upgrades wouldn’t include expanding to Miller Road, a stretch of Hazel Valley Road or any of the other rural streets deemed financially unfeasible and excluded from the project, Moore said. He didn’t know how many people won’t get access to public water.

He suggested future projects with their own grants could branch out into those roads if enough people would benefit — typically at least one customer per quarter mile.

Alyson Miller, one of several Miller Road residents who have spoken out about being excluded from the project, said she didn’t hold out much hope.

“I would think, if they got any more funds, that the right thing for them to do would be to bring the water out here on Miller Road,” she said Thursday. “I do. It would be the ethical thing to do. But I don’t put any faith in them.”

Years of sorting out whether they were excluded and why have led Miller and her husband, Deward, to conclude that they don’t want anything more to do with the water authority, she said. But her husband’s cousin hauls water for his family, as does another neighbor with a disability.

“It’s one of those things that you don’t really think about until you don’t have it, and then everything revolves around it,” she said. “It wouldn’t be kind of me as a neighbor to say I wouldn’t want them down here now.”

People who have gotten water describe it as a relief.

“I’ve lived there 30 years and that’s the first winter I haven’t been worried about whether it’ll freeze or something,” Benny Stout, a member of the Rural Development Authority who uses a well and lives in the southeast, said at the development authority’s meeting last month. The development authority oversees the water authority.

“It takes a load off,” Stout said.

His fellow authority members asked Moore and other project officials if the new water system might be overwhelmed in the near future, given their surprise at the number of interested customers. Tim Mays, a project engineer, said that was unlikely.

“Uniformly spread over the system, I think you could get 50 percent more,” he said. “We feel like we have ample supply.”