St. Albans Town Manager Carrie Johnson participates in a town selectboard meeting. Former selectboard member Al Voegele, is now the town's interim director of operations. 

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St. Albans Town Manager Carrie Johnson participates in a town selectboard meeting. Former selectboard member Al Voegele, is now the town's interim director of operations. 

ST. ALBANS TOWN – The Town of St. Albans selectboard has again shifted its approach to solving its new town hall’s water problem.

Utilizing a reverse osmosis (RO) system will be the latest in an ongoing process to find a clean water source for the building. Largely finished back in April, the new building has sat empty since that time, and DEW Construction crews are no longer on site.

The water problem, however, began this March when testing found that the well dug to service the public building was contaminated with salt and other chemicals in concentrations that would require additional water filtering.

Since that time, the selectboard has explored options to find a fix within its contingency budget. Options on the table included installing a reverse osmosis system or finding a completely new source of water.

The selectboard eventually went with the latter option, and the town administration spent the summer exploring the possibility of tapping into the line of a neighboring property’s well.

New water testing data provided by Chevalier Drilling this past week, however, showed that the new source of water is also too salty for use, and overall, it will most likely cost $4,300 more than options that had initially been on the table.

So, it’s back to the reverse osmosis system and finding a way to make the town hall’s well function as intended.

Selectboard members approved the change Thursday morning during a special session, where they laid out their approach.

“Why we're here today is instead of going in the direction that we had previously talked about – because of the costs that are coming in – we believe that the better route now is to change directions and go with the most cost effective, less risky way, which would be using the well that we dug for this project,” Town Manager Carrie Johnson said.

Thankfully, the town had ordered such a system as part of its earlier discussions. The plan at that time had been to install a large tank and the RO system in tandem to collect the wastewater created from the filtration process. The extra effluent would then be shipped out and dumped into the City of St. Albans sewer system.

Dave Chevalier, who is advising the town on behalf of Chevalier Drilling, informed the board that he no longer had the RO system after selling it to Bayside Pavilion. He said when the town began to pursue another option, he thought there was no need to hold onto it.

The town will now need to order another one, again, from California, and it will be at least four weeks before it arrives and is installed.

Several frustrated members of the public were in attendance at the meeting on Thursday, and they questioned why the selectboard and the town administration were still dealing with securing a clean water source this late in a $5 million project.

Many of the attendees were bay-area residents, like Anne Pomeroy, who said it’s well-known that the “water down here is bad.”

Johnson and selectboard members, however, argued that the correct environmental assessments and checks that are regular in commercial development had been completed ahead of time.

“We did do a lot of due diligence before we broke ground,” Johnson said. “Primarily on the soil, we spent two to three months talking about the different things we had to do to treat that soil.”

She said the town built the new town hall in the way its construction team and consultants advised.

“It'd be great if someone had thought about it. We can't go back and change it. We can only go forward and change it,” Johnson said.

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