Future growth fuels sewer costs
The Saxonburg Area Sewer Authority charges the most for new sewer connections of any authority in Butler County.
The authority's manager, Paul Cornetti, said the high costs are to pay for facility upgrades that other sewer authorities will one day need to imitate.
The Saxonburg Area Sewer Authority took on $54.85 million in debt in 2007, he said, when building its facility in Renfrew. Today, it owes about $39.80 million.
“It's just a matter of growth,” Cornetti said. “Growth will always end up requiring people to upgrade facilities.”
And it is future and current growth, he says, in the authority's coverage zone of Clinton, Jefferson, Middlesex and Penn townships plus Saxonburg that demands it runs a facility that can handle more than it currently needs. The Renfrew plant handles about a million gallons of sewage a day, and it could handle twice that amount, Cornetti said.
Tap-in fees, or fees for new connections to the sewer system, can run as high as about $7,400 when all is finished. The rate is cheaper for homes built in formally planned developments, which covers the majority of development within the authority's boundaries. But even at lower rates around $5,000, the fees are still among the county's highest.
Cornetti said they need those rates to pay down their debts.
He likens it to a mortgage. The authority, and therefore its customers, are paying a lot, he admits. But he maintains that other entities are merely delaying the same pain.
“Say I got a mortgage 15 years ago,” he said. “I thought, 'How am I going to eat? How am I going to be feed my family?' But younger people today are looking at their mortgages and, well, I have no idea how they're going to afford it.”
He believes their costs will eventually fall in the county's rankings.
“Eventually, we will be that older home,” he said. “People will say, 'How do you keep rates so cheap?'”
On tours of the facility, Cornetti shows off the technology paid for by high rates.
Older systems, he said, still have sections relying on clay pipes that are degrading and breaking over time. The Saxonburg Area system uses PVC pipes.
Those pipes allow significantly less infiltration underground, so the plant is being taxed with less unneeded, excess water.
A walk around the treatment center is an exercise in following around an ecosystem of tiny “bugs,” as the center's crew calls them. They cycle new sewage in with the critters, let the water whirl around curves and up into silos. Blasts of infrared light kill the microbacteria before the clean water is pumped into the Connoquenessing Creek.
The authority serves about 4,000 customers.
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