Sunbury committee reviews $30M wastewater-plant expansion, weighs 30- vs. 45-year financing

City Manager Hennessy walked Sunbury’s Finance Committee through preliminary financing scenarios on Jan. 15 for a planned wastewater treatment plant expansion, saying the city has two bids in hand and that the total project cost (including contingency, contract administration and inspection) now looks “somewhere between $32,600,000 and $34,100,000.”

The presentation set out two borrowing terms — 30 years and 45 years — and conservative revenue assumptions. “We do have 2 bids in hand,” Hennessy said, noting a base bid of $30,200,000 and a base-plus-alternates bid of $31,620,000. He listed alternates that include a covered sludge-storage facility and a building renovation that would add lab and office space for operations staff.

Why it matters: the committee must decide how much to borrow and how to cover annual debt service estimated in Hennessy’s model at roughly $1.4 million (shorter term, base-plus-alternates) to about $1.0 million (45-year term, base bid only). The discussion laid out revenue sources the city expects to rely on — tap fees, an industrial reservation tied to east-side development, new community authority (NCA) receipts, a $2,314,000 water-and-wastewater infrastructure grant, and a possible draw from the utility fund.

Hennessy described the assumptions behind the cash-flow model: an annual tap-fee income of about $681,600 based on 100 new residential taps per year, a $6,500,000 balance in the utility fund with a modeled working balance…