Franklin County water comes at a high price

Utilities View Larger Local More Local Stories US & World More US & World Stories Local Stories from ThisWeek More Articles By Earl Rinehart The Columbus Dispatch Sunday September 21, 2014 10:55 AM

Diane Mays cant wait for the lines to be laid that will bring drinking water to her Mifflin Township home for the first time in 20 years. Shes worried, though, about something else that will flow to her home the highest water rate in the county.

Franklin County system users pay 84 percent more than Columbus residents pay for water, according to the county sanitary engineer department. Like most Columbus suburbs, the county buys its water from the city.

This is a very, very low-income community, Mays said of her Leonard Park neighborhood. She already has a lien of at least $8,000 on her $100,000 market-value home for the sanitary sewer line the county installed about three years ago.

Still, the waterlines would mean that her son, Matt Bowen, would no longer have to make three trips a day to fill a 330-gallon tank in a pickup truck at a faucet outside the township hall to top off the leaky 1,025-gallon water tank at her house. Mays well has never pumped clean water. It ran dry about five years ago.

And I raised five kids in that home, Mays said, standing outside the ranch home on Missouri Avenue.

The township water has always been free, township Service Director D.J. Tharp said.

On the other side of Columbus in Franklin Township, residents of the Mon-E-Bak Farms neighborhood have water in their wells but cant drink it because its contaminated with their own sewage.

Leonard Park, squeezed into a corner of I-670 and Stelzer Road, and Mon-E-Bak, nestled in the crook of I-70 and Wilson Road, top a list of 20 unincorporated urban pockets slated to get waterlines. Work begins next month in Leonard Park; Mon-E-Bak must wait until 2016.

The average quarterly water and sewer bill for a Columbus family of three is about $184. For a resident of Dublin, where the median household income is $144,000, its $225. In Mon-E-Bak, where the average income is $18,000, and other areas served by the county, the bill will be around $332.

Read the original post:
Franklin County water comes at a high price