New solution proposed for contaminated water problem at Montville High School
Montville — A fix for Montville High School’s water dilemma will be among the requests for capital projects on Mayor Ronald McDaniel’s desk in 2017.
The school has relied on bottled water for drinking and cooking since the fall of 2012, when a contractor conducting a routine analysis of the school's well water found high levels of manganese. The building still draws water from the well on school property for non-drinking purposes.
A proposal to build a $6.8 million pipeline along Route 163 to bring an alternative water source to the high school created controversy in 2014, and fizzled last year after residents and town officials deemed it too expensive.
Last year the district drilled a new well, also on school property, which does not have the high mineral levels that plagued the current well.
Now, Superintendent Brian Levesque said, the district just needs money to pay for the cost of hooking up the high school to the new well and clearing out the pipes of dried manganese that has caked the inside the school’s piping.
A consultant has said that the project could cost about $220,000, an initial estimate that Levesque said could change.
The school’s pipes are constricted by manganese that has accumulated over the years from the original well water flowing through them. All of the school's pipes either need to be replaced or cleaned out before the school can start using water from a new well.
"There's a lot of manganese in the pipes," Levesque said at a Board of Education meeting last week. "We have a source, so now we ... have to first figure out how to get the manganese out of the system."
The school board voted to add the plumbing project to the list of capital requests that Levesque will present to McDaniel for consideration as the mayor drafts a town budget for the 2017-18 fiscal year.
The superintendent and other town departments submit requests to the mayor for capital projects, and the mayor compiles them into the capital plan portion of the budget that he then submits to the Town Council for a vote later in the year.
Levesque said at last week's school board meeting that the water project is an important one, even in another year when state and local economic constraints will make budgeting difficult.
The proposed pipeline, which would have run from the intersection of routes 163 and 32 and end at the high school, was on its way to a ballot referendum before protests that it would be too expensive killed discussion of the project.
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