HAYESVILLE — About 100 people packed Hayesville’s Kendig Park shelter house Tuesday evening to hear about potential grant funding for village upgrades and also hear about options to improve the village’s aging water treatment plant.
For a village of about 500 people, Mayor Bob Vinsak said the turnout was exactly what village leaders had hoped.
A committee headed by zoning inspector Robin Beasley went door to door to invite people to attend the meeting to hear about the $500,000 Community Development Block Grant for which the village plans to apply.
CDBG grants are competitive grants administered by the state’s Office of Community Development and funded by the federal government.
Beasley said local businessman Ben Ferguson has offered to donate a piece of land to be used for a grant-funded community project such as a walking path and athletic fields, if the village receives the grant. Vinsak estimated the land, which is across Cottage Street from the village ball fields, is three to four acres.
Grant funding could also be used for things like traffic signal upgrades and paving of parking lots, but cannot be used to pave roads, Beasley said.
Beasley emphasized the importance of community involvement in the process and encouraged village residents to attend future meetings, including a session during an open house at Vermillion Institute on Aug. 18. At that meeting, she said, the committee will take their own ideas, as well as those collected from the community and begin prioritizing plans on a whiteboard.
Vinsak said the grant application will be a long-term project. The application cannot be submitted until March 2019 and funding would not be received by the village until 2020.
Steve McQuillen, Jim Braeunig, Amy Jarvis and Pam Bright serve on the grant committee, in addition to Ferguson and Beasley,
Hayesville residents also heard an update from water treatment consultants Phil Lewis and Matt Winter of K.E. McCartney. The village hired the firm a few years ago to evaluate the current condition of the village’s water treatment plant and to study the village’s future options.
Though the village’s four wells originally produced over 100 gallons per minute, the plant’s current capacity is 38 gallons per minute. Peak demand in the village is 65 gallons per minute.
To correct the problem, Lewis said, the village has four options. It can rehabilitate its existing water treatment plant; build a new water treatment plant with new wells; build a new plant with new wells that also tie into the existing wells; or connect to Ashland’s water treatment plant.
The least expensive option, coming in around $2.1 million, would be to build a new plant with only new wells.
The most expensive option, connecting to Ashland’s plant, would only be viable if the village could obtain a 75 percent grant from the Ohio EPA to fund the estimated $4.2 million project, Lewis said.
Village officials will work with Pam Ewing of The Rural Community Assistance Partnership to determine what grant funding might be available for the various options, and the village council will vote on how to proceed.
At the end of the meeting, Vinsak announced that because of ongoing sewer problems, the village is likely to raise sewer rates by about $8 per month in the near future. The mayor said one major cause of the problem is residents flushing things that should not be flushed in toilets, such as baby wipes that are marketed as flushable, but should not be flushed.
