A draft of a consultant’s report finally details what the Hickory Log Creek Reservoir costs Canton: about $2 million a year in bond payments, construction and operating costs.
The report, evaluating the worth of the 414-acre Cherokee County reservoir, was obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through an open records request.
The reservoir, which has been in development since 2000 and may finally start delivering drinking water in June, is 25 percent owned by Canton and 75 percent owned by the Cobb County-Marietta Water Authority.
When the reservoir was first proposed on land donated to Canton, its projected cost was $19 million. According to the consultant’s draft, the total cost of the reservoir is now slightly more than $91 million.
With the mounting costs, Canton has been trying to unload the reservoir since last summer and transfer all the ownership to the Cobb County-Marietta Water Authority, while keeping access to its water supply.
The city — which floated $27.1 million in bonds through the Canton Building Authority to build the reservoir — had to raise water rates by 30 percent last summer to help pay for reservoir costs. There was a political cost as well. Two longtime City Council members who supported the reservoir were voted out in November.
The Cobb County-Marietta Water Authority hired a Newton, Pa.-based consultant, Howard J. Woods Jr. & Associates, in January to put a price on Canton’s 25 percent stake. He told the authority last month he could not fix a value on Canton’s share until the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gives the authority permission to use the extra water it would get if it buys out Canton.
The corps said it could take at least six months to determine how much, if any, additional water it would give the authority permission to use. That decision could be further delayed by pending litigation between Georgia, Alabama and Florida in the two-decades-long tri-state legal battle over water.
According to the consultant’s report, Canton pays about $200,000 a year in the reservoir’s estimated $800,000-a-year operating costs, and the city’s annual interest payments on bonds are almost $1.5 million.
Canton Mayor Gene Hobgood said Tuesday by his reading of the consultant’s draft, parts of which are blacked out, the consultant isn’t placing any value in Canton’s 50 percent say in how the reservoir is operated (a percentage established by a joint operating agreement a decade ago), nor is there an estimate of how much it would cost to build the reservoir in today’s dollars.
“We absolutely believe there is a value in our decision-making authority, and that needs to be factored in,” Hobgood said. Canton has proposed giving Cobb total authority to run the reservoir even if Canton keeps rights to a percentage of the water in the deal.
By the end of May, or early June, the city and the authority may finally get a permit from the corps to start releasing drinking water from the reservoir, reservoir manager David Hatabian said Tuesday.
The water would then be sent through a mile-and-a-half-long 42-inch pipe and discharged into the Etowah River, from which Canton can withdraw as much as 11 million gallons a day. The water would keep flowing to Lake Allatoona, from which the authority can withdraw 33 million gallons a day.
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