CWP Stakeholders Meeting January 22

Author	Message
David Fleming Jan 14, 2009 11:01 pm	CWP Stakeholders Meeting January 22 Greetings Elk Comprehensive Watershed Plan Stakeholders: This is a reminder that our next stakeholders meeting will be next Thursday, January 22 at 7pm at the community building. Craig Mains, an engineering scientist with the National Environmental Services Center at WVU will start the meeting with a short talk about decentralized wastewater alternatives. Following the talk, we will continue our stakeholder discussions and move forward with the common vision for the future. In case of bad weather, we are working out the details for a snow date. We’ll let you know those details soon. We appreciate your participation and hope to see you next week. Evan Hansen, Fritz Boettner, and Anne Hereford Downstream Strategies
DALeatherman Jan 15, 2009 7:24 pm	Re: CWP Stakeholders Meeting January 22 I'm so glad you have this speaker scheduled. Since the PSD meeting tonight was cancelled, I assume the PSD will not apply to the IJDC on Jan. 20 and will wait till Feb. 20 in order to get public comment before presenting a plan. As the spokesperson for SPOC (Snowshoe Property Owners Association) and a full-time homeowner/ratepayer/taxpayer for the past 10 years, I'm anxious to hear what Mains has to say about decentralized systems. While I feel the PSD and Thrasher has recently done due diligence in evaluating sites and technology for a regional plant, we have not seen much on alternative methods to handle wastewater in the valley. Considering how costly all of the regional plant options are, my main concern is the increased financial burden to Snowshoe resort and homeowners--99.9% of the "ratepayers." If a regional plant is built with sewage piped from Snowshoe, resort property owners would be financing a facility that would provide service to properties and developers in the valley. The cynical view I've heard expressed is that a regional plant can be built using money from outside of WV, because most resort homeowners are out-of-state landlords who rent out their properties. The reality is that increased sewer rates translate to higher rental fees, which can impact the number of visitors to the resort. If anyone thinks this doesn't affect the county, he/she should ask the gas stations, food stores and liquor stores on the resort access routes. Increased sewer rates also affect sales of resort properties, and county property tax income. It's unfortunate that the EHWA watershed study is not finished so it can be considered before the IJDC application, but it will be available this summer, before the PSD application to the DEP. Meanwhile, we are in a new and welcome phase of communication and transparency among stakeholders. I hope we can all continue to exchange information, research options and discuss what is best for the county--without rancor.
martin saffer Jan 16, 2009 8:17 am	Re: CWP Stakeholders Meeting January 22 I understand the PSD may take this up at their regular meeting which I think is January 27th. There is a proof readers problem here: proof reading is best done by someone other than the author. I think we need peer review by another engineer. The same engineer really delivers "more of the same" and also wants the project to be the same so that the same engineer is still in the game.
DALeatherman Feb 2, 2009 6:50 pm	Re: CWP Stakeholders Meeting January 22 Mains' presentation was very interesting, but did not go far enough to help us because it dealt too much with individual home systems rather than what is at the end of the pipeline. . I like the idea of a decentralized system, but we need to know more. This is an alternative I'd like for the PSD to look into, since it seems that many communities have gone this way instead of big regional plants. The increased nitrogen levels is a concern with the decentralized systems. Unfortunately, we have more questions than answers.

Back to Topics List Reply