During their Tuesday meeting, the Rockmart City Council approved an important request from city administration to go forward with a plan to upgrade the water system in order to deliver more water to customers, and be able to handle waste created during the treatment process as it is returned back into creeks.

City Manager Jeff Ellis requested that the council approve a loan for $670,000 from the Georgia Environmental Finance Agency to be put with another portion of the funding being sought through an Appalachian Regional Commission grant to help finance two projects to help the city increase capacity at both ends of the system. The city will be required to make a match of $230,000 to comply with the grant requirements.

“We’ve had a request for increased water capacity, and the only way to increase water capacity is to increase the amount we can get to the plant,” he said.

The loan was approved unanimously.

Ellis explained the first part of the project funding with ARC grants – if the grant sitting on Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk is signed – will allow the city to increase the amount of capacity it can deliver in water to the taps as the number of residents in the city grows, as well as commercial and industrial needs. The other half will be used to increase the wastewater treatment capacity by replacing bar screens and increasing the amount of storage for the sludge that results from the process.

He said that Rockmart has paid more since sludge is no longer being taken at the Grady Road Landfill since a ruling last year in a suit between the operators, GFL (formerly Waste Industries) and the County over issues at the facility over the past years.

“When this issue with the sludge started, our problem was that we didn’t have the digester space, which required us to transport more than our sister city in Cedartown,” he said.

New water lines in the other half of the project would be run from existing wells starting around Plum Street within the city and around streets and Lester Field and the park to make it to eventually make it to Richardson Field where raw water is gathered and pumped to treatment plants.

Ellis hopes to save the city money by being able to decrease the number of times they have to get rid of the resulting sludge to other landfill facilities that will take it. He added the goal will be to put the city into a financial position that they will be able to repay the resulting GEFA loan without incurring too much cost to taxpayers in interest payments.

“This is a total project of $1.5 million,” he said. “This will give us the resources we need and meet the service delivery demands of the city for many, many years to come.”