The Brown County Water Improvement District’s Board of Directors met on Tuesday evening in their regular monthly meeting.
Rates for irrigation water and for docks on Lake Brownwood were one of the first topics discussed at Tuesday’s meeting.
The Board of Directors unanimously approved at 12.5% increase in fees for having a dock on Lake Brownwood in 2010. That increases the annual cost of a single story dock from 16 cents per square foot to 18 cents. It also raises the annual cost of second stories from 8.5 cents to 9 cents per square foot.
Dennis Spinks, General Manager of the District said, “Those docks on the lake need to finance some of the expenses we are incurring on the lake.” These new expenses include work that the Lake Patrol is doing along with required inspection costs.
Spinks said that a dock owner will see an average increase of $20 per year for a dock. This is taking into consideration that the average dock is about 1000 square feet in size.
There will also be an increase in cost to lease dock space on McCartney Island and Goat Island. McCartney prices will go from $320 per year to $350 while Goat Island from $215 to $235.
The board also considered an increase in the cost to provide irrigation water to customers who use the service, but board members voted to keep those rates unchanged in the coming year.
Other action taken by the Water Improvement Districts Board of Directors was approval to spend $16,514 for the repair of a pump at the District’s Riverside Drive pump station.
Directors also approved a change order for work being conducted on the District’s new microfiltration system. They approved the change order not to exceed $180,000 for the needed repairs and modifications.
Mike Morrison from the engineering firm Frees and Nichols made a presentation regarding the repairs and modifications to the new microfiltration water treatment plant. Morrison said that he hopes to have modifications compete and ready to start the plant up by Thanksgiving at full capacity to monitor if the modifications were successful.
County Surveyor Don King also gave board members an update on the FEMA flood plain mapping situation. King stated that resolutions passed by Brown County, the City of Brownwood, and Water District were delivered to FEMA just recently. Those resolutions asked FEMA to keep the flood plain in Brown County at 10 feet above the spillway level and to ask to open a dialogue between the county and FEMA regarding historical flooding data.
