West Fork residents and city leaders might be able to appreciate the old marketing slogan used by Fram, maker of automotive oil filters. Usually, an auto mechanic in a commercial would make the comment about the large-scale mechanical disaster that could be avoided by changing a car's oil and filter regularly.
"You can pay me now, or pay me later," the mechanic warned.
What’s The Point?
West Fork’s decision to significantly increase water and sewer rates is a necessity to protect the region’s water quality.
For West Fork, it's pay me later time.
The City Council last month approved a 24 percent rate hike for water and sewer services. That follows other increases since 2008. Once the new rates are fully implemented, West Fork will have some of the highest around.
The latest increase is designed to raise about $60,000 a year in support of a $4 million loan from the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission. That loan is critical to West Fork's plan to connect its sewer collection system to Fayetteville's sewage top-notch sewer plants.
West Fork's 43-year-old sewage treatment plant is outdated and failing to get the job done. The city has been cited multiple times for overflows, which send pollutants into local waterways.
Once upon a time, this might have been viewed as a small town's problem, but where does that pollution end up? In the White River, and in Beaver Lake. In other words, the potable water supply for all of Northwest Arkansas.
It makes sense for Fayetteville, whose citizens have invested heavily in the city's ability to adequately treat sewage, to take on neighboring West Fork's collection system. Treatment standards and the costs of equipment have simply gotten too high for a town West Fork's size to reasonably handle. But West Fork has significant improvements to do to its collection system before it hooks up to Fayetteville. Its pipes have suffered from too many years of inadequate maintenance and replacement, letting rain infiltrate the system. That can be a recipe for disaster in any effort to treat sewage.
The huge increases for water and sewer are a symptom of having inadequately addressed system needs for too long. Who's fault is that? Some want to blame one city official, but it takes a village to allow things to have gotten as bad as they are in West Fork.
The price is steep, but West Fork residents owe it not only to themselves but to all of Northwest Arkansas to resolve this problem and its impact on local water quality. Higher prices are hard to swallow, but it goes down easier than polluted drinking water.
Commentary on 09/02/2014