TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTWO/WAWV) – The City of Terre Haute and Indiana American Water are gauging community interest about expanding local water services in the Terre Town area.
This comes after numerous concerns from residents about well water.
A public forum was held at Terre Town Elementary School where city officials and Indiana American Water officials gave a brief presentation in front of roughly 50 neighborhood residents.
This forum was solely to gauge community interest. Officials said that without a substantial amount of community support, this project won’t be able to happen.
A previous attempt to potentially expand water services in this area failed nearly a decade ago. Terre Haute Mayor Duke Bennett said that was likely due to a lack of funds to help with the homeowner’s cost. Now, there’s ARPA that could be used to help with costs.
There’s a potential of up to $5,000 in costs for the homeowner, but that number could drop with that extra funding available.
“This issue is all across the state, there’s lots of neighborhoods that do not have local water service,” Bennett said. “Now there’s state money and there’s some federal money to help make these projects real.”
However, this is dependent upon community interest. Up to around 430 Terre Town area homes could be impacted, and officials said that it would be ideal to have them all on board with the plan. Bennett said it’s difficult to commit a certain dollar amount without plenty of community support.
“That’s kind of what we’re doing is figuring out how many people are interested so we can go figure out the exact cost in order to move this forward,” Bennett stated.
Without the community interest, the plan would simply end just as it did back in 2013.
Terre Town resident Dennis Wardenburg has lived in that neighborhood for almost 30 years. He said that he’s comfortable with his well, but he’s heard complaints from neighbors about theirs.
“Some neighbors around me don’t like the taste of their water and I’ve heard of black stuff in the water,” Wardenburg said. “But me, I don’t have any complaints on the water.”
If the Terre Town project draws plenty of interest, Bennett said water services could expand in other areas.
“We have other areas that we will be looking at in the future if we’re able to move this project forward,” Bennett said.
