Plan aims to create a Bossier Parish water and sewer district
One of the busiest public bodies in northwest Louisiana is the Bossier Parish Police Jury, and it shows. New and improved roads, refurbishment and replacement of bridges, development of property standards to protect the investments of property owners, serious attention to parks and recreation – These efforts are just a few reasons Bossier is one of the fastest growing parishes in the state.
And add to that list the jury’s ongoing project to create a Bossier Parish water and sewer district, which will greatly enhance the quality of living in briskly expanding parts of the parish and open new areas to development.
Planning commenced in 2004 to bring together a number of small, separate sewer systems, which came together as a consolidated utility district in 2007. Although the initial focus was and remains the Highway 80 corridor, other areas of the parish will also see help with water and sewer in the not too distant future.
Bossier Parish Administrator Bill Altimus and Bossier Parish Utilities Director Larry Landry spoke about the reasons for this $45 million effort, and its current status. Landry worked in and directed municipal utility systems on both sides of the river for nearly 40 years before joining the jury staff to manage its new utility district.
The catalyst for the project, said Altimus: “The needs of development and the limiting factors to growth in Bossier Parish or any parish ... is water and sewer – water and sewer infrastructure. If you don’t have water, decent water, then you’ll never have anyone living out there. They don’t have water to drink, to bathe, whatever. On sewer, you can have individual (i.e. septic or small systems), but that leads to two problems.
“You’ll never have any commercial development – take the Highway 80 corridor – Walmart is never going to show up on Highway 80 under the circumstances that are there now. Brookshires, on the top of the hill at Hillcrest, started out with an oxidation pond. No way any entity of any size will ever show up and have an oxidation pond as their sewer system, but that’s what they had to do because they wanted to be out there. But there was no public sewer.”
So until you get a public sewer out there, you’ll never have much cleaning up or commercial growth in that area without public sewer. It just won’t happen.”
The second thing is at some point in time, Department of Environmental Quality or Environmental Protection Agency or a combination of both is going to put the stops on construction in that you have a community system.”
Landry said the “groundwork” for halting construction of these very small community systems would come from a Louisiana DEQ’s total daily maximum limit, a standard which is being enforced on all the streams in the state.
“[DEQ] started south, working north and what they’re going to come to is these people who have these small systems on these small streams, they’re [DEQ] going to say, ‘You’re going to have to put in a system like this – in other words, you’re going to have to make that [wastewater] into almost drinking water before you can put it back in that stream,’” Landry said. “And it’s cost prohibitive, so what we’re doing is intercepting all [wastewater] that we can, and we’re going to take it to a location that’s better suited for that kind of discharge, which is the Red River. And we’re going to have a really nice plant that treats really, really well and doesn’t have any smell associated with it, and it’ll put water in the river that’s cleaner than the water that’s in the river right now.” The target date for the plant is 2014.
While the jury’s utility system project will include water, the current emphasis has been on the sewer aspect of the system. Landry detailed the sources of funding for the $45 million largely sewer project.
“The plant was actually paid for by [state] Facilities Planning and Control in capital outlay; we go approximately, for engineering and everything, about $15.6 million from capital outlay, and the plant is going to be around $10.5 million, we hope. And there was $17.75 million in state revolving funds from DEQ at a .95 percent interest rate for 20 years, and $11.8 million in bonds.”
The sewer treatment plant, which will be located along the Red River in the Cash Point vicinity, hasn’t yet been built but is on the drawing board.
Bossier Parish’s utility planning isn’t limited to Bossier Parish exclusively. Altimus described a broader view. He said, “We’re running parallel with Caddo [Parish] to look at a regional water deal for Caddo and Bossier Parishes because the same issues and concerns we have here in Bossier – they’ve got the same concerns in Caddo, and they’re very interested. Like the I-49 corridor that’s coming through in the north part of the parish, they [Caddo administrators] feel like there’s going to be a tremendous amount of development potential at those intersections and how all that works – well, you’ve got to get water to those people.”
And Landry said, “You’ve got to have sewer, too, so we’ve opened it up to all utilities.”
Marty Carlson, a freelance writer, has been covering local news for the past 13 years. She can be reached via email at [email protected].
