Thank you, Mr. Brown, for properly scrutinizing, or should we say ingeniously spinning, the Leak Protection program. I am sure that everyone is removing his hand from his wallet after reading your letter to the editor from Sept. 10.
After all, $36 per year to pay for a service that has been free for the last 50 years is not more than anyone can afford. No one minds if your raise our mandatory bill by almost 15 percent. We all wish that everyone we do business with would do the same (!).
Is the water department in the red because of upper management’s incompetence with the stinky water problem? Why are Steve Brown and Steve Rapson manufacturing this crisis as they have manufactured other crises? Is it to exploit these crises to get more money in the county till?
Thirty-six dollars per year times 27,000 residential customers is almost a one million dollar increase to the water department for a problem that has not cost the county more than (my estimate) $100,000 a year for the last 50 years.
What facts or figures did Mr. Brown and Mr. Rapson bring to the other council members that made them think that this was a necessary charge? If the water department is in the red or if it is going bankrupt, perhaps its customers should know about it. We need to know how many private leaks the county has compensated its residents for in the past 10 years in order to know how bad this problem is.
It seems strange that Mr. Brown experienced a broken water line on a relatively new home in the Lake McIntosh area. A bad contractor? My home near Lake Peachtree has not had a leak on our side of the meter and it has been here almost as long as Peachtree City. We did have a leak two years ago on the county’s side.
How considerate of Mr Brown to allow customers to opt out of paying the $3 for the Leak Protection program that was previously a free service by the water company. But, it should also come with an option to change to another water provider. However, since the water department has a monopoly on the water service in Fayette County, customers really have no other option.
I called the service line number which Mr. Brown noted in his recent article. I could not get answers to my questions. I was told that with the Freedom of Information Act I would be allowed to submit my questions in writing, but that the research necessary to answer them would cost more than the $36 leak protection fee that I would pay this year.
Mr. Brown says that the Fayette County Water System was allowed to go into disrepair in years past. I disagree. It simply is in need of regular maintenance (which is budgeted yearly) just like the storm sewer system, the highway system, the sewer system, the golf cart path system. Any system requires maintenance after a long time of use.
To say that a new engineering firm has miraculously brought the water system back to life is not true. Have we never, in the last 50 years, beaten the requirements of the “Total Organic Carbon Measurements”? Does Mr. Brown think that Fayette County citizens are so ignorant that we don’t see through his efforts to distort facts and figures, create crises where there are none in order to require us to pay more money where more money is not needed?
With regard to the Lake Peachtree issue which Mr. Brown mentioned also, the county, the city and the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey Department have spent enough money on surveying and monitoring this problem to have fixed the problem many times over, and the problem is not dredging, the problem is maintenance on the spillway.
The cost of only one of the monitoring stations set up by the USGS could have paid for the maintenance and the lake would have been full for the last seven months.
The dredging is not on schedule, the county never had a schedule to dredge it and it is doing the dredging only because of a years’ old agreement between the city and the county.
Charles Phillis
Peachtree City, Ga.
