MOUNT VERNON — County taxpayers are still covering repair costs from damage caused by a fiber optic company working in Apple Valley.
Mercury Broadband hired a Texas contractor to install lines in the area, and crews have damaged water mains, sewer lines and meter equipment.
Though Knox County has billed Mercury, Water and Wastewater Director Jeff Pickrell said the company has not paid.
“They’re bucking on the bills. They want more documentation,” he said.
Boring crews left the area in late August, but returned briefly this month to close pipeline loops before leaving again. Even during that short return, Pickrell said, the crews ran over a water meter.
“Our guys hit one of their [pipes], and we made it very clear I’m not paying them until we start to see something coming back to us,” Pickrell told county commissioners last week.
He said he does not really expect payment. The unpaid bills have strained the department’s budget and forced staff to work significant overtime, which employees often take as comp time — leaving the department short-staffed at times.
“There are things that we wanted to do that we can’t do because we’ve spent that money and had a lot of overtime,” Pickrell said. “It just kind of festers and has a snowball effect.”
The county engineer’s office approves permits for pipeline installations. Pickrell and the commissioners are exploring whether the county can withhold future permits from Mercury until it pays.
However, County Engineer Cameron Keaton said his office cannot deny a permit that meets application requirements.
Additionally, Pickrell noted Knox County has already approved most of the easements Mercury needs.
“They kind of inundated us with a whole bunch of them [early on],” he said. “The customers out there are not happy.”
Ohio EPA delays well permit over treatment requirements
The county drilled a new well, No. 7, and submitted testing results to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. However, the agency has delayed the installation permit.
Pickrell said the OEPA “has kind of thrown us a curve ball,” raising new treatment requirements tied to containing iron and manganese.
“It appears that they’re going to require us to do some treatment if we bring that well online for the whole system,” he said.
Meeting the Ohio Revised Code regulations requires the county to build another pump station and treatment plant — and to treat water from all its wells, not just the new one.
“That’s significantly different than what any of us had anticipated needing to do,” Pickrell said.
“We’re putting in a third big well so that we have redundancy, which is what they want us to do. We’re doing this to make sure that we have adequate water supply to our customers. Whenever a well is down, we’re still good and we’re not putting them on a water restriction. And sometimes you get your hands slapped.”
Other projects underway
With the pause in fiber installation work, county workers are catching up on new installations. Other updates include:
- Pipeline cleaning using “ice pigging” begins this week at a cost of $60,000. Pickrell said the pigging should improve pump station capacity.
- Water and sewer lines are installed at the new administration building near the Apple Valley entrance. Crews are working on installing gas lines.
- The Hawk Company will soon rebuild 15-year-old monitoring equipment at the Little Jelloway wastewater treatment plant.
- A contractor will repair the collection system at Pleasant View Acres to reduce inflow and infiltration, and remark lines lost when the township chip-sealed the road.
- The county’s leak detection system will get a free software update. The update requires workers to pull and replace about 256 monitors systemwide.
