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City council agenda: building pipeline, installing cameras
YOUNGSTOWN
City council today will consider installing a pipeline to provide up to 2.2 million gallons of water a day from the city to Aqua Ohio.
The pipe, about 1,800 feet long, would be installed along South Avenue, near Sam’s Club, in Boardman, with a construction start date in late May or early June, said city Water Commissioner John Casciano. The project should cost about $300,000 to $400,000, he said.
If approved by council, the legislation would permit the board of control to seek proposals for the water-line construction project.
The city signed a contract in June 2011 with a no-compete clause to sell water to Aqua Ohio. The clause forbids the two to sell water to the other’s customers.
The move killed the possibility of the ABC [Austintown, Boardman and Canfield] Water and Storm Water District buying bulk water from Aqua instead of from Youngstown.
About a year later, the city is ready to hire a company to install the line.
The contract, which runs through Dec. 31, 2025, calls for Youngstown to sell 250,000 to 2.2 million gallons of water daily to Aqua.
The city would sell about 1 million gallons a day to Aqua for about $100,000 annually, Casciano said. Youngstown would sell the water with a 10-percent surcharge over what it charges those in the city.
Youngstown water customers outside the city — including those in Austintown as well as portions of Boardman, Canfield, Mineral Ridge, Liberty and Girard — pay a 40-percent surcharge.
Also today, council will decide whether to permit the board of control to buy eight surveillance cameras for up to $60,000 to monitor illegal activity related to the city’s water and wastewater operations.
“We’ve had problems with people illegally turning on water after it’s been shut off, stealing manhole covers and damaging fire hydrants,” Casciano said.
It’s not difficult to turn water back on after the city shuts it off, he said.
The cameras would be placed in locations where these illegal activities occur, Casciano said. The cameras are expected to be installed in the next month to six weeks, he said.
“We don’t want to say where we’ll put them,” Casciano said. “That defeats the purpose of having them, but we’ve now given fair warning” that the city will have them.
The city installed nine cameras, at a cost of $55,000, in July to catch those improperly dumping garbage and debris on vacant land, and other illegal activities.
Those cameras haven’t been as successful as anticipated, said Jennifer Jones, program coordinator for the city’s litter control and recycling division. The division oversees that camera program.
“We’ve got about a dozen” citations for illegal dumping, she said. It’s more difficult than expected to “get license plates to file charges. But people stopped dumping in areas where the cameras are located.”
She said, however, some people are going about 100 feet farther away from the cameras and dumping there.
Also, watching daily videos from “the cameras are a bit more time-consuming” than expected, Jones said. A part-time person will be hired to watch the videos, she said.
The water and wastewater departments, as well as the fire department, have used the illegal dumping cameras to see if people are stealing manhole covers and tampering with fire hydrants, Jones said. The nine incoming cameras also would be used to catch illegal dumping, she said.
Q-Star Technology of Torrance, Calif., will install the wastewater cameras.