Posted on April 28, 2016
By Curtis Tate and Bill Estep, McClatchy Washington Bureau
One of the most influential and senior members of Congress has once again pulled funding for a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study of the reservoir that supplies water to his hometown.
Since the completion of the Wolf Creek Dam in 1951, Lake Cumberland has supplied water to surrounding cities in southern Kentucky. But unlike other corps-managed reservoirs elsewhere in the country, its users got free water.
The corps wants to bring the users of Lake Cumberland’s water in line with federal law, which requires water systems to pay for storage and the cost of operating and maintaining dams. But the agency’s efforts have been thwarted by Rep. Hal Rogers, the chairman of theHouse Appropriations Committee.
Rogers, a Republican who was first elected in 1980, represents Somerset, the largest Kentucky city that relies on Lake Cumberland for its water supply.
The corps has been trying for years to complete a water allocation study for the reservoir, which Rogers has opposed.
Rogers inserted a provision into a $37.4 billion spending bill his committee approved last week for energy and water development projects across the country. His measure would cut off funding for the corps water allocation study, which the agency planned to finish in 2018.
Loren McDonald, project manager for the Corps of Engineers Nashville District, said the corps is $200,000 short of what it needs to finish the $569,000 study.
“Without being able to complete the study,” she said, “we’re kind of at a standstill.”
If the corps can’t finish the study, McDonald said, it cannot renew access for Somerset and 10 other users of Lake Cumberland water.
Although she said the corps has no plans to cut off the reservoir’s intakes, McDonald said that if the cities continued to draw water without a renewed easement, they would be technically trespassing on federal property.
“How we would choose to handle that situation, if at all, is yet to be determined,” she said. “We are committed to finding solutions.”
Somerset and several smaller cities, along with a state park, a fish hatchery, a charcoal factory and a power plant currently pay nothing to draw water from Lake Cumberland. Based on a 2004 draft study, its 11 users owe a combined $11 million going back 65 years to the lake’s creation.
The corps would allow the users to pay off what they owe over a 30-year period.
The largest single user of Lake Cumberland water is the East Kentucky Power Cooperative, which operates a coal-fired power plant next to the reservoir at Burnside.
Nick Comer, a spokesman for the utility, said it “continues to work with the corps to negotiate a new easement and has engaged with the corps in their water supply study.”
The utility, Comer said, supports the language Rogers put in the appropriations bill and has reservations about entering into a commitment to pay for water storage in Lake Cumberland because of uncertainty about how federal regulations on carbon dioxide emissions could affect the power plant’s future.
Rogers opposed the completion of the water-allocation study, which the corps began a decade ago, to protect its current users from paying the storage fees.
When the corps told Rogers that other potential users had expressed interest in using Lake Cumberland as a water source, he dropped the budget language that had hindered the study’s completion.
But Danielle Smoot, a Rogers spokeswoman, said that when the corps could not identify any potential new users, Rogers revived his budgetary prohibition.
“Congressman Rogers included language in the Energy and Water Development Appropriations bill to prevent the corps from moving forward with an unnecessary study to impose additional fees without providing water to any new communities,” she said.
Users of Lake Cumberland’s water were pleased by Rogers’ effort to block the study.
“That would be great news for our community,” said Scott Upchurch, manager of the Monticello Utility Commission.
The potential of having to raise water rates to cover new charges for using Lake Cumberland as a water source was a concern, Upchurch said.
He noted that one of the county’s largest manufacturing employers, Belden, which makes data-transmission products, announced this year it would close by the end of 2017, with a loss of 230 jobs.
“We’re getting hit really hard economically,” he said.
The city’s water system serves 7,000 households.
The Corps of Engineers had not yet calculated what the city’s one-time charge would be under the water-reallocation study, but Upchurch had heard an unofficial figure of $600,000.
Somerset, Kentucky, Mayor Eddie Girdler also said the budget language on the water study was good news.
“I do appreciate Congressman Rogers doing that,” Girdler said.
Girdler said he understands the corps faces costs for operating the lake and the Wolf Creek Dam. He said he wouldn’t mind paying a small annual fee for using the lake for water storage, and doubted other local officials would, either.
For Somerset, which has a population of about 11,500 people, that annual fee would likely be a few thousand dollars. In neighboring London, with a population of about 8,000, the fee is $3,000 to $5,000 a year, according to local officials.
Girdler said the real concern over the Corps of Engineers study is that it would have led to cities being charged a significant one-time fee, plus putting them on the hook to pay a share of future repair costs on the dam – a big unknown.
“Our concern is excessive cost” for the one-time fee and potential expensive dam repairs, Girdler said. “That’s what scares me.”
Girdler said that initial charge could have been $1 million or more for Somerset, where the water system serves 20,000 customers.
Girdler said it wouldn’t be fair to stick small cities for a share of major repairs to a federally owned dam.
A project completed in 2013 to seal leaks at the dam cost about $600 million.
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