The Londonderry Utilities Committee met on March 5 to discuss the continuing water situation people in town are facing.
Hoping for aid from state officials, Town Manager, Mike Malaguti, praised efforts by members of the Utilities Committee and town residents for their work in moving an expansion of the municipal water supply forward.
“Guests from the state who have participated in similar projects talked about how they’d never seen such a community effort, they’ve never seen the town staff and the town boards and committees coming together in a professional manner to provide accurate and timely information about a project like this,” said Malaguti. “Great feedback, and it’s a great look for Londonderry.”
According to initial vote tallies, funding for an extension to the water supply system on High Range Road was approved by Londonderry voters during the recent election.
“This pipeline is going to help the region,” said Utilities Secretary, John Ferreira.
The Town Manager added, “It needs to be a community decision where and when [the water pipe] goes next.” While the High Range Road extension is designed to serve homes most impacted by Saint-Gobain’s PFAS contamination, town officials intend it to be the first step in a much more extensive expansion to the town water supply in the coming years.
While Utilities’ energy subcommittee has not had a meeting recently, Chair, Lynn Wiles, assured everyone they were “still moving forward with the Community Power Aggregation Program.”
“There’s no sense of urgency to do this, I think we have enough time to make some educated decision on how we move forward,” said Wiles.
A public hearing on the project is expected to get local feedback, although no date was set.
The Twin State project to bring hydroelectric power down from Quebec was declared a “dead deal” for the time being, following news from the Town Manager. While the details were unclear, there were apparently cooperation issues between local American and Canadian power suppliers.
Neither the Town Council nor the Utilities Committee was committed to the Twin State proposal, despite several meetings and some preliminary interest.
“It sounds like a great idea, clean power, but we need to think about what we have in the state of New Hampshire and who has control of it,” said alternate member, Ray Breslin. “We need to think about what power is being used, particularly hydropower here in the state of NH.”
He questioned why they had little control over potential, local sources of power, and raised the possibility of asking Donald Kreis from the NH Office of the Consumer Advocate to come in to explain the situation in more detail at a future meeting.
“We need to listen to somebody who is in the middle, like the consumer advocate,” said Breslin.
The Utilities Committee is scheduled to meet again on Tuesday, April 2, at 7 p.m. on the first floor of the Moose Hill Council Chambers.