Franklin City reviews aging water infrastructure, flags 60 million-gallon loss in first quarter

Franklin City officials heard updates on the municipal water system Tuesday, including recent meter replacements, two emergency main-valve repairs and a review of an unexplained loss of about 60,000,000 gallons of water in the first quarter.

The discussion matters because the losses may indicate faulty meters, leaks or billing issues that could affect system revenue and require work outside the current budget, officials said.

Speaker 3, a staff member, said the utility received delivery of residential meters this week and that the "total bill was 90 some thousand" for that order. Speaker 3 also reported emergency replacements of a 12-inch and an 8-inch water-main valve since the board's last meeting and said the bolts on older installations have rusted; those valves were installed in 1991. "We had, have had to replace 2 days after our last meeting, a 12 inch water main valve and an 8 inch valve," Speaker 3 said.

Speaker 3 said the city must watch older neighborhoods for similar failures and that doing preemptive replacements would be difficult given current budget limits: "I'm not in a position right now with the budget to take on unnecessary work per se." The council discussed options such as using year-end funds or reserving money to address future breaks.

On water accounting, Speaker 3 said, "I think there's still 60,000,000 in the first quarter that's unaccounted for." Staff said some of that total may reflect known losses for flushing and main breaks but that the figure is large enough to warrant a focused investigation. The city plans to read meters Monday and Tuesday, bring in a contractor to test larger meters that the city cannot test in-house, and then determine whether the discrepancy stems from meter error, unrecorded use or distribution loss.

Speaker 2, a staff member, clarified a line-item on the voucher list identified as "bank fees," saying the fees are US Bank charges for a postal lockbox service that processes mailed utility payments and applies them to customer accounts: "US Bank posts them and processes the payments for us so that we don't have to and applies them to utility bills." The city previously budgeted $75,000 for water-loss work and has purchased a new acoustic leak detector; staff said they are short two positions and hope to add personnel in July to address leak detection work.

The city will report back after the meter reads and large-meter testing to identify whether the missing volume reflects meter error, unbilled use or distribution loss. No formal actions specific to committing new budget authority were taken at the meeting.