Friday, May 17, 2002
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Friday, May 17, 2002 |
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New WASA building to open this summer Should provide more lab, maintenance space By JOHN
MUNFORD
A new administration building for the Peachtree City Water and Sewerage Authority will put its office, maintenance and laboratory operations all under one roof. The building, under construction on Ga. Highway 74 South at the Rockaway sewage treatment facility, will replace the hodgepodge of small buildings WASA currently uses at the aging and soon-to-be mothballed Flat Creek treatment plant. The project is expected to be ready for move-in around mid-July, said WASA General Manager Larry Turner. The new administrative building features a larger laboratory, which will allow the authority to handle water quality testing for the city in the future, Turner said. The lab has a separate entrance door so samples can be brought in without disturbing other operations; the public will enter the building through a lobby that's adjacent to the parking area. The new facility also has an indoor maintenance area where key large equipment such as a vacuum truck can be stored in cold weather to avoid problems, Turner added. Next to the maintenance area is an outdoor high pressure water system which is necessary for cleaning parts from the various pump stations that keep the city's sewage flowing. Inside the administrative section are a board room where WASA will be able to meet instead of using City Hall, a break room for employees that will also be used for meetings, a room with several workstations so field employees will have a place to make calls and perform other tasks as necessary, a kitchen and locker rooms. The price tag is $1.2 million, which the authority is paying for out of its capital equipment budget. That money will be repaid to the capital equipment fund with proceeds from the recent bond sales that will pay for WASA to expand its capacity to 6 million gallons a day, Turner said. It was necessary to build the administrative building before the expansion project because officials didn't want to have contractors working on the building and the expansion of the Rockaway plant at the same time, Turner said. That expansion will double the capacity of the Rockaway plant, where the building is located, to 4 million gallons a day, making it the largest plant in the system.
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