Blackstone board advances plan to replace aging water meters, eyes RFP approach

The Town of Blackstone’s Water & Sewer board opened a discussion on a program to replace the town’s aging water meters and approved moving an appropriation article to the annual town meeting warrant to fund the work.

Staff described a large-scale replacement that would cover meters that were left out of earlier rounds of work and estimated the project would take months to complete once contracted. The board heard a ballpark cost estimate for roughly 3,000 meter endpoints including installation; the transcripts present that figure as approximate and partially corrupted in the record, and staff characterized the numbers as a preliminary “ballpark.” Staff also said new meters would typically carry an expected service life on the order of 20 years and that modern automated-reading systems can flag steady overnight flows and other patterns consistent with leaks.

Board members debated procurement approach. Several members urged an RFP or specification-driven procurement so the town could require features such as radio collectors, repeaters, software capabilities and sonic/ultrasonic meters for large services, rather than selecting the lowest bidder on price alone. The board discussed a collector/repeater arrangement that could capture about 60% of residential reads remotely, with the remaining locations handled by drive-by collection or by installing cellular-enabled modules on a small number of hard-to-read meters.

Members also discussed operational details and resident impacts. The board agreed the town would abandon redundant irrigation meters in many cases when converting to a single radio-read town meter and said the town would recover and scrap privately owned irrigation meters that the town replaces, with a promise to reimburse owners for meters taken out of service. The board debated equity concerns: some members said single metering reduces clerical work and long-term cost; others raised that properties tied to sewer systems would still pay sewer charges while properties on septic would not, making the change a policy issue requiring further discussion.

Next steps: staff will prepare a warrant article for the annual town meeting to appropriate funds and will develop specifications and RFP documents for vendors to price. The board did not adopt a final meter-policy change at the meeting; members agreed to advance the funding request first and resolve policy details (for example, single vs. dual metering) afterward.