Benton Harbor City Commissioners have declined to redo a water system capacity study that was conducted earlier this year.
At a Monday meeting, commissioners heard from Fleis and VandenBrink Engineering’s Elaine Venema, who said the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy has not approved the study submitted in March because it plans for the future of the water system without solving a projected $2.5 million annual shortfall.
“EGLE cannot approve that as a water utility must be sustainable, and so EGLE wrote this letter back in late October kind of identifying the city needs to close the gap, either by finding a way to treat it at a lower cost, finding additional sources of water revenue, or procuring drinking water from a source at a lower cost,” Venema said.
Commissioners balked at redoing the study because part of it would study the costs of getting water from St. Joseph or Benton Township instead. They have resoundingly reject that idea.
Mayor Marcus Muhammad said the city will not be engaging in such a negotiation.
“We are prepared for a standoff with the state because we need to be negotiating not with St. Joe, but we need to negotiate with the state because of the revenue loss that we lost at their hand in between their two emergency managers where we were pumping nearly five million gallons of water per day, and now just about a million,” Muhammad said.
Muhammad said the state is to blame for the Benton Harbor water system issues.
Commissioners voted unanimously to table an EGLE request for the capacity study to be redone.
