Hartsville proceeds with $1.59M water meter loan

Hartsville City Council gave preliminary approval to an ordinance that will allow the city to borrow up to $1.59 million to buy and install a digital water metering system that reads meters automatically.

The digital water meters can be checked wirelessly through a signal beamed to a communications tower that will relay the information from all of the meters to the city’s finance department in a matter of seconds, public services director James Clemons said.

The system will be able to read all nearly 4,000 water meters in the city in a matter of seconds, Clemons said. Chesterfield County uses the same system, he said. “It can read all of their meters in 55 seconds,” he said.

Clemons said city workers will install the meters. He said the installation process could take up to a year.

An estimated 3,000 existing manual meters will be equipped with a new transmitting device that will send a signal from the meter. Another 900 older meters will be replaced with new meters, Clemons said.

The new system also will pinpoint leaks in the water system, including leaks at individual homes, at the time they occur and will improve efficiency and save money, officials say. Detecting leaks early and stopping them can save consumers money as well, Clemons said. The city typically loses about 22 percent of its water annually to leaks in the system

The new system will also ensure more accurate readings of actual water usage with more accurate billings, he said.

The system is being paid for with a previously approved 30-year loan from the federal government.

Council gave first-reading approval to an ordinance that will allow the city to seek financing for the project from banks. The federal loan will be used to repay that financing. Revenues from water usage fees paid to the city by customers will be used to pay off the federal loan, Clemons said. The ordinance still must receive final approval on second reading and a related ordinance must also receive council’s approval.

In other business during council’s regular meeting Tuesday, city manager Natalie Zeigler reported that 22 abandoned houses have been demolished through the city’s residential demolition project. The program identified 72 structures for demolition.

Twelve houses have been torn down by the city, five by their owners and five by Darlington County Habitat for Humanity to make room for new construction, Zeigler said.

Council also accepted a bid of $48,238 for protective firefighter bunker gear for the fire department. The purchase is being funded with a federal grant for which the city had to provide a 10 percent match.

Council also accepted a bid to repave the city-owned parking lot next to Centennial Park downtown for $63,800 from Dempsey Construction Co. The money to pay for the project will come from proceeds of the sale of a portion of the parking lot to First Citizens Bank which needed a strip of the property for construction of its new building on South Fifth Street adjacent to the site.