Great Barrington — The selectboard has ratcheted up the pressure on the embattled Housatonic Water Works, sending a letter to the company asking it to provide bottled water and filtration systems to its angry customers.
The board has been holding a series of closed-door meetings — most recently last Wednesday — to plot strategy for addressing the myriad problems of the privately-owned water utility that provides drinking water to approximately 850 customers in the Housatonic section of Great Barrington and small adjoining portions of Stockbridge and West Stockbridge.
Town Manager Mark Pruhenski said at Tuesday’s selectboard meeting that the board had instructed him to write a letter to Housatonic Water Works treasurer Jim Mercer asking his company to “provide relief to its paying customers.”
See Edge video of the May 3 Great Barrington Selectboard meeting. The discussion concerning Housatonic Water Works begins at 3:00:
Click here to view Pruhenski’s letter, which concluded with the following sentence: “Given the severity of this situation, the Selectboard would appreciate a response no later than May 31, 2022.” That prompted a plea from selectboard member Leigh Davis to tell the company the board “expects” a response.
“We really need to get them on record that they received these complaints and that they are listening to us,” Davis said. “So I would ask for stronger language.”
Selectboard member Ed Abrahams, who has tangled recently with Davis over the issue of regulation of short-term rentals in Great Barrington, suggested a change in language would have no effect.
“We have no authority over them,” Abrahams said. “We can ask for whatever we want but we don’t regulate them … I’d be inclined to keep it polite at this point.”
But selectboard member Eric Gabriel, himself a Housatonic resident, agreed with Davis. Board member Garfield Reed suggested “appreciate and expect a response.” And with that, the rest of the board members agreed and Pruhenski said he would send the letter, as amended, via certified mail to HWW as soon as possible.
Mercer did not respond to a request for comment on the selectboard’s letter to his company. HWW has not issued a statement since its March 30 news release on recent testing results.
The embattled HWW has been the target of sharp criticism from customers and town officials for discolored water, insufficient fire hydrant pressure and — most recently — the presence of a potentially cancer-causing compound, HAA5, caused by the company’s disinfection process. The company did release testing results from the first quarter of this year indicating a drop in the compounds, though the levels remain higher than those considered safe by regulators.
The state Department of Environmental Protection, told Mercer in March that his company failed to adequately notify MassDEP and the public of the presence of HAA5, and failed to report the analytical results of the contaminants and of the monitoring period, as required by state drinking water regulations.
Meanwhile, town residents Sharon Gregory and Denise Forbes have been conducting a survey of HWW customers asking water users if they or members of their families have “suffered from cancers or environmental illnesses” such as Crohn’s Disease or ulcerative colitis.
“The information provided will be maintained as confidential and used by professionals seeking to map incidents of cancer and disease by HWW water users,” said the survey, which will also be mailed directly to Housatonic residents.
According to Gregory and Forbes, if the results of the survey and the data analysis warrant it, the information provided by the respondents will be used to “identify what steps should be taken to ensure the safety of HWW water.”
The two women have formed a group called Residents For Clean Water. Gregory, Forbes and other Housatonic residents staged a photo op yesterday in front of the Berkshire Food Co-op in downtown Great Barrington, where they distributed surveys to passersby.
They also sought signatures for a petition that has been circulating since February. The petition calls on Gov. Charlie Baker to “to take responsibility for a disastrous public health crisis that needs swift attention after being stalemated.”
The petition asserts that HWW is “in violation” of state Department of Environmental Protection regulations related “to poor management processes, unremedied systems, and lack of investment over a long period of time.”
The petition further calls for HWW to be taken through eminent domain, “converting it to a quasi-governmental organization with an independent board and oversight,” and asked for a moratorium on additional fees and rate increases, which would need approvals by the state Department of Public Utilities.
The HWW system is also bedeviled by brown roily water, which the state acknowledges is a problem, but that problem is outside the DEP’s jurisdiction. According to Brian D. Harrington, deputy regional director for the bureau of water resources at the DEP, the state is primarily concerned with water quality and rates but not “esthetic” issues such as brown water that is otherwise safe to drink.
After fielding complaints too numerous to count, the Great Barrington Selectboard commissioned two engineering firms to assess the condition and value of the system. AECOM, an infrastructure consulting group, recommended improvements to the HWW system that would cost more than $30 million — a number that Mercer disputes but that an AECOM engineer termed “ugly.”
Town Manager Mark Pruhenski has laid out four possible scenarios for town action: 1) the town acquires HWW and operates it as an enterprise fund; 2) acquires HWW and hands the system over to an independent water district serving HWW’s existing customer base; 3) the town acquires HWW and “works with the Fire District to potentially merge those two systems”; 4) or, in Pruhenski’s words, “the status quo, but with the town playing a more active role than it has in the past.”
The Great Barrington Fire District is a quasi-public organization that provides drinking water to the rest of the town outside Housatonic.
