Avon Lake Regional Water receives loan of $32 million for upgrades

Avon Lake Regional Water will receive two loans totaling over $32 million for a series of upgrades to its water filtration plant. The upgrades will fund multiple projects for the Avon Lake water and wastewater utility, including the demolition of old buildings and improvements to filtration and disinfection systems, Chief Utilities Director Rob Munro said. "This is improvements at the water plant that will improve the plant, new technology that will be installed as far as new filters," Munro said. In a news release sent Tuesday, the Ohio Water Development Authority announced it would provide more than $38 million in loans for seven waste and drinking water improvement projects in six communities. Avon Lake was tapped to receive the most money by far, coming in the form of two low-interest loans. One loan will be for $25 million and comes with an interest rate of 3.56 percent and the other for $7.4 million at 4.07 percent. The loans total about $32.4 million and will last for 30 years. The money will be used to pay for two general contracting services and demolition. Great Lakes Construction of Medina will serve as the general contractor and Lycoming Supply Inc. of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, will be the demolition contractor. The upgrades to the facility will include the replacement of 12 water filters that were original to the 1926 building, Munro said, with four new filters. Munro said the original filters would be officially decommissioned, and it would only take four of the new, much more efficient filters to make up for the capacity. Additionally, regional water will transition from a chlorine gas-based disinfection system to one that uses liquid sodium hypochlorite, which Munro said is safer. "It's a much safer product, not just for us at the plant and employees handling it, but for the public also," he said. "With the chlorine gas, there's always a concern of an accidental release or malfunction." The demolition project will remove older buildings on the regional water campus that are no longer needed. Munro said the original building will remain. The plant also will gain additional storage for chemicals to treat the water, which Munro said was driven by supply chain issues during the COVID-19 pandemic that made getting enough of those chemicals difficult. Munro said that from start to finish, the entire process should take about two years, hopefully starting in the coming weeks. He said payments on the loans would not begin until one after the completion of the project. "Obviously the last couple years we've seen interest rates are at like 25-year highs for everything," Munro said. "That's one of the big benefits of us using the OWDA, we get below market rates. And we actually get a discount off the rate because we have other loans with them. … That is a significant amount of money at a very low interest rate." Munro said that pursuing outside funding and maintaining good relationships with state agencies like the authority helps keep the utility's fees low. The utility's fee are the lowest of any municipal water agency in the state, Munro said. Avon Lake Regional Water provides water services to more than 200,000 residents across seven counties, and sanitary sewer services to over 30,000 in Avon Lake and other Lorain County communities. Of the six communities to receive funding from the state in this round, Avon Lake's roughly $32 million makes up the lion's share of the total. The second most money to one community was to Columbus, which received $3.988 million at 3.72 percent for five years for the preliminary design of stormwater improvements and $562,030 at 3.26 percent for 20 years for the construction of 9,000 feet of waterline. Contact Owen MacMillan at omacmillan@chroniclet.com.