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Town Looks To Upgrade Water System
The town of Goshen has received two $20,000 grants to be put toward beginning the work of upgrading the town’s water system, and is in the hunt for an additional $100,000 in grant money for the same purpose.
At Town Council’s regular meeting on July 10, Vice Mayor Steve Bickley reported that the town had received a $20,000 Small Project Grant from the Virginia Department of Health. That money will be used to pay Thompson and Litton, a Radford-based engineering firm, to do an asset management plan for the town, which will involve doing an engineering evaluation of the town’s water system and identify any problems with the components of the water system. This will help the town prioritize which areas of the water system are in most urgent need of repairs and upgrades.
The other $20,000 grant comes from the Southeast Rural Community Assistance Project (SERCAP), and the work it will be used for is two-fold. The first thing they will be doing is helping the town with leak detection and identifying where the leaks in the system are. Currently, the town is pumping 2 million gallons of water per month, but only billing for half of that.
The other thing that SERCAP will be helping the town with is remapping the water system to determine exactly where things are.
“One of the problems that we’ve found is that what’s in the ground doesn’t match our drawings and our drawings don’t match what’s in the ground,” Bickley told The News-Gazette on Monday. “They’ve got some GPS mapping gear and they’re going to come in and help us identify what’s really in the ground and the locations of some of the things that the drawings show that we can’t find. We’re going to find out once and for all whether they’re actually there or not.”
A recent example of the disparity between the town’s maps of the system and the system itself came during the town’s water crisis in 2022. While the valve that was causing the problem was found and repaired, it wasn’t on any of the town’s maps.
“It just happened to be found by guys walking the system with a metal rod, poking it in the ground,” Bickley said. “They hit the valve cover underneath of a bush that had grown over top of it.”
The assistance from SERCAP may not end at the mapping and leak detection, as Bickley said that once they finish those projects, they will be able to determine if there is further assistance they can offer Goshen.
Additionally, the town is in the process of applying for a $100,000 planning grant through the Central Shenandoah Planning District Commission to try to identify places in town that are in need of immediate work. The money, if the town receives it, would be used to hire an engineering firm to do testing on the water line to determine the levels of deterioration in different parts of the system.
“We know that we’ve got a significant amount of pipe in the town in the 40-year range right now that has a 50-year expected lifespan,” Bickley said. “We don’t really expect it to fail when the clock hits 50 years, but this will give us an idea of what we should expect and what we should plan for.”
Bickley said that the application should be completed and submitted in early August and that the town should hear whether it’s been approved or not “within two or three months.”
The other piece of financial news that the Town Council received at the meeting was that the CSPDC had made a like-kind donation to the town of $156,000 for the volunteer hours that Bickley and Mayor Tom McCraw had put into working on the community center project. That money can be used as matching funds from the town for grant applications toward the project, including the Community Development Block Grant that the town has recently applied for to fund the construction of the community center.
