“I’m trying to do it where there will be no service interruption at all,” he said. “Nobody will be without water service.”
The transition is anticipated to happen later this spring, Crouch said. Residents will receive notification letters within the next couple weeks.
While the installation of the new connection will take about a month, transferring the accounts into Fairfield’s system could take about a year, he said. Much of that work is converting meters. Hamilton measures its water usage in cubic feet while Fairfield measures it in gallons.
Hamilton charges about $35 a month, which includes a 50 percent out of city surcharge. That’s more than $18 a month more than the city’s rates, Crouch said. Affected residents receive a credit toward their sewer bill to subsidize the difference, which about $10,586 annually, he said.
“It will kind of clean up the billing process. There’s a bunch of different reasons why it’s a good thing to bring them back in,” Crouch said.
One reason is the ability to turn off a resident’s water for lack of payment, he said.
Hamilton’s water was recognized as best in the world at the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting event earlier this year in West Virginia. Last year, the city’s water was deemed the “Best in the U.S.”
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