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City staff seeks State Revolving Fund loans to extend water service to underserved subdivisions
Summary
City engineer presented a plan to apply for SRF loans to lower costs of water main extensions into eight subdivisions without service; two pre‑applications (Foothills Estates and Lake View Hills) were submitted with a multi‑year rollout proposed to reduce special‑assessment burdens on residents.
City staff told the Hutchinson City Council on May 25 that they will pursue Kansas State Revolving Fund (SRF) loans to lower resident costs for extending potable water service to several subdivisions currently without city water.
Evan Patterson, city engineer, explained SRF program basics: projects are pre‑scored and ranked by Kansas Department of Health (KDHE) based on water‑quality, consolidation, reliability and income metrics; approved SRF loans can significantly reduce interest costs (staff cited rates at roughly 60% of market for a 20‑year loan) and sometimes allow partial forgiveness depending on funding and project need. Patterson said the city pre‑applied for two projects (Foothills Estates and Lake View Hills) to meet the May 1 pre‑application deadline and will pursue full applications if pre‑approval is received.
The SRF approach would let the city use low‑interest SRF loans to subsidize special assessments, reducing the per‑parcel cost for residents who previously declined petitions because of high expense. Patterson showed staff’s preliminary list of eight subdivisions lacking access and estimated the work would add a few hundred customers to the system; he described an 18–24 month process from pre‑application to construction for a successful SRF loan.
Patterson and finance staff said council will need to approve resolutions for each SRF application and that public hearings and special‑assessment procedures will follow pre‑approval. Council asked staff to continue outreach to neighborhood petitioners and to study bundling smaller neighborhoods into single SRF applications where practical.
What happens next: Staff will await KDHE’s pre‑approval list (usually published in July), conduct required public meetings, prepare full SRF applications (due in October), and return to council for application resolutions if pre‑approval is received.
