Water in the works for Hamlet

HAMLET — In previous council meetings, City Manager Matt Christian illuminated a serious longstanding problem for the city — water.

According to Christian, it is possible that 75% of the city’s water meters are reading 6% under the actual amount of commercial and residential water being used.

“We have talked for five maybe fifteen years about water we have treated and never get paid for,” Christian said.

Hamlet is currently sitting on a little over a million dollars of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding recently earmarked for water meter improvement.

ARPA is a nearly $2 trillion dollar federal program signed into law by President Joe Biden to combat the COVID-19 pandemic by conveying flexible aid payments to local counties, cities, and municipalities.

Unfortunately, to completely revamp the Hamlet water system, the city would need to allocate nearly $2 million, far in excess of current ARPA coffers. Christian suggested the idea to initiate a pilot program.

“Starting with a pilot project of maybe 500 meters, that would get the network infrastructure in place, it would allow us to replace our oldest meters and actually build a proof of concept,” Christian said.

Council Member Abbie Covington concurred with Christian’s pilot program concept but was concerned with prescribed sample size. “We are talking about a project that encompasses 3,763 meters- 500 meters – I don’t think is going to give you reliable data. If I was going to do a pilot project, I wouldn’t do less than 1,000 meters,” she said.

The city ultimately decided to initiate a request for qualifications (RFQ) process to install 1,500 new water meters and the requisite infrastructure.

This week the Hamlet City Council took the first step in getting the program online, hearing a public project proposal from Andy Honeycutt, President, and Chief Consulting Officer of MeterSYS.

MeterSYS, headquartered in Raleigh, but previously out of Aberdeen has a very specific core mission. “Assisting public utilities in the planning, selection and implementation of AMI (advanced metering infrastructure), this is all we do, and we love it,” Honeycutt said. He went on, “It’s very pragmatic, it’s very essential, it’s the cash register of your utility.”

Honeycutt described how AMI technology would be implemented in Hamlet.

“Your house or business with a meter in front if it, if you drive by you can pick up that signal, AMI creates a network, a transmitter is talking to network four to six times a day but with hourly interval usage data, building patterns of consumption and looking for anomalies. Is there a leak in your homes, does an industry want to curb consumption or become more conservation focused, and then you get that info to your customers. They can pay their bill online, see their usage profiles, set alerts, connect to a much more detailed manner the relationship between utility and consumer.”

“We are going to touch every meter in your system,” Honeycutt continued. “We are going to understand what it is, when it was installed, what type of meter it is, is it stopped or is it operational, does it need to be pulled or just retrofit. Every account that is or should be served by the city will be covered as part of the process.”

Mayor Bill Bayless asked Honeycutt what initial steps will look like. Honeycutt responded, “We will assess your system – number one, so we would meet the staff, understand your software, your asset data…where are we going to get the best value for those 1500 meters.”

After hearing Honeycutt’s proposal, the council voted in favor of the project, save for one nay.

Council member and Mayor Pro-Tem Jesse McQueen voted against the digitized water meter pilot program. “I don’t think this is a decision that’s going to be positive for Hamlet. We got a review of our water plant several years back and we are looking at what they recommended as multi million dollars worth of upgrades to the actual plant. I just think that we are putting too much money into the reading of the meters, not that it may not be needed at some point, I’m just not ready for it now,” McQueen said.

McQueen assured the Council and Honeycutt that his vote was in no way a reflection of MeterSYS’s exceptional product or presentation.

With water as an over-arching motif, Christian explained several other RFQ’s for council consideration.

Christian described a recently procured storm water asset inventory assessment grant, valued at $400,000. “As you know we have quite a bit of issues with stormwater in the city. Our storm water is what I would call an ad-hoc system. It’s built over time as issues presented themselves and, in the future, moving forward, and to get more grants, we need to have a better understanding of what’s going on, or you know, how to best manage that system – we need to understand it.”

The council unanimously approved LKC Engineering of Aberdeen to oversee the project.

Additionally, according to Christian, the city received roughly $10 million to improve the city’s water treatment plant and replace approximately 4,200 feet of water lines and a series of service connections. Again, LKC Engineering was approved without dissent.

The council went on to approve three firms for on-call engineering services. LKC, WithersRavenel, and Thomas & Hutton, will be on call for service to Hamlet, carrying out, “projects where staff can take the initiative and move projects forward,” according to Christian, without having to go through a labor intensive RFQ process.

Lastly, Christian made some suggestions to the council for updates to the city’s personnel policy.

• specified tobacco-usage policy

• added more language to employee probationary period

• adjusted travel and meal policy

• extended bereavement leave

• drafted a reasonable suspicion drug use form

• created a social media policy

• guidelines for in-session public comment

After several questions and clarifications, Mayor Bill Bayless requested all personnel policy updates be tabled until the next meeting for further review.