CYCLONE — At the Aug. 1 Keating Township meeting at which Ordinance 110 was adopted to establish restrictive setback requirements for windmills in the township, supervisors addressed some new business as well.
Chairman Dave McClain and supervisors John Anderson and Ryan Herzog approved Resolution No. 2024-M to create the Keating Township Municipal Authority. Subsequently, supervisors also approved the classes necessary for Anderson — already in charge of the township’s roads and sewer system — to acquire a water authority operator certification.
Anderson has completed those courses and just last week the initial organizational meeting of the Keating Township Municipal Authority was held.
McClain will be the authority’s chairman and Anderson vice chairman.
Anderson said supervisors felt the move was necessary as Hilltop residents have struggled with water quality issues for many years. The area’s infrastructure is aging right along with the volunteers running the organizations, like Pithole Water Association and Aiken Water Co.
“The volunteers are getting older and nobody has really stepped up to replace them, so they’ve been kind of heading into crisis mode,” Anderson noted.
Anderson said, “With the injection well moving in, residents are worried whether their water will be ruined and it’s already terrible. We already have a giant problem to start with without adding anything to it.”
The injection well Anderson refers to is that of Catalyst Energy Inc. of Pittsburgh, situated just off Route 646 in the tiny Hilltop village of Cyclone. Residents there are so concerned that Catalyst’s injection operations will only worsen their “already terrible” water that they have mounted an appeal of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) permit.
“Having a clean water source compared to the wells that are up there,” Anderson said, “is definitely a positive for everybody.”
Bradford City Water Authority Steve Disney explained that Anderson reached out to him to explore the feasibility of a connection to the city system from the Hilltop area, whether the authority would be willing to serve those residents or have the capacity to do so.
“I told him, yes, for sure,” Disney said. “We (the Bradford City Water Authority) want to help their cause and we do have the capacity to serve the entire area from Rew, to Aiken, to Cyclone and Ormsby, if need be, if they do get funding that allows them to run a water main and connect onto our system.”
Anderson told The Era, “We engaged an engineering firm who was able to secure what they call tech assistance money from PENNVEST to research how best to go about fixing it all and us (Keating Township) taking it over.
“When we reached out to PENNVEST about that, they asked us to include Rew as well, so we ended up with Rew in our little plan.”
The Pennsylvania Infrastructure Investment Authority, PENNVEST, according to its website, serves communities through capital funding for drinking water, wastewater, stormwater, non-point source pollution prevention and other related projects.
PENNVEST funding aids communities to increase the health and safety of commonwealth citizens, protect the environment, promote economic development and improve water quality.
Anderson said the Keating Township Municipal Authority in mid-November will take over all three water systems.
For now, customers don’t need to change anything; continue conducting any business like making payments as normal.
“Just be watching your mail in December,” he said. “There will be a letter coming to everybody with instructions for what’s going to happen going forward.
“We literally just had the first authority meeting (Oct. 22) getting everything started,” Anderson said. “We’re working on getting everything transferred over to the authority so the authority can start operating Jan. 1 — managing the water systems and the billing and everything like that.”
At the same time, he said, the authority will work on building a new system by researching the best options, contracting the necessary engineering and securing the required permits.
“That’s going to be a few years down the road before it’s actually all built,” Anderson said. “At this point we have a meeting with DEP and PENNVEST coming up to facilitate the transfer of operational permits and to examine what the deficiencies are that we really need to work on up there, on all three (Rew, Aiken and Cyclone) systems.”
Right now, the authority is considering two options. One is to connect to the City of Bradford’s system via the Droney Road area and the other would involve building a centralized plant in the Gifford area that would feed the other two communities on either side — Aiken and Rew to the northeast and Cyclone and Ormsby to the southeast.
Extending to Ormsby, Anderson said, will depend on the level of loan and grant funding the township can acquire and “how many customers could be up there and how much money it costs to run however many miles it is between Cyclone and Ormsby.”
On Route 646, by car on Summit and Ridge roads, it is 9.3 miles from Rew to Ormsby. By vehicle, via Droney Road, it is approximately 3 miles from Big Shanty Road where the authority would connect to Bradford’s system, to Route 646 in Gifford. Then there would of course be the side streets and each residence connection.
At this stage of the project, Anderson said the authority estimates both options would cost approximately $12 million.
Asked if he was concerned about any potential perceived conflict of interest in the fact his father, Dick Anderson — who is already a contractor on Catalyst’s injection well and conducted some excavation back when the sewer system went through the township — is expected to bid on the work.
“Well, it’s a seven-person board, I’m not the only person on the board,” Anderson observed. “I don’t know if that is a project that my dad would do. It might be a larger project than he would take on.
“If he bid on it and he was the low qualified bidder, it would be up to the board whether to accept that bid or not,” Anderson continued. “I would, of course, have to recuse myself.”
