The town of Century and the town of Flomaton are both experiencing problems with water pumps. Both are about to spend a lot of money to fix those problems.
The town of Flomaton voted Monday afternoon to go to its line of credit and borrow $117,680 to fix the problems with the well on Highway 113. Century is also looking at ways to fix the problem of the well that feeds Century Correctional Institute.
Those could have been critical issues, but both towns did a good job reacting and were able to tie in to adjacent water systems to meet the current needs. That was good planning.
But how do you plan for the future with your water and sewer systems? We all know the answer to that question, but nobody wants to pull the trigger.
Nobody wants to see their water or sewer bill go up, but if town's aren't charging enough to not only cover the cost of providing us those utilities, but enough to make repairs down the road, the problems will continue.
Mechanical equipment fails. Sometimes it fails because those pieces of equipment fail. Other times they fail because those pieces of equipment haven't been maintained properly.
We know it's easy for us to sit here and say towns need to put money back for repairs. Most people try to do that at their house but things happen.
Towns, like households and businesses, have to take money from A to pay for B. That's just they way it is.
We applaud the Flomaton Town Council for biting the bullet and going ahead fix the entire problem. But we are concerned that if this problem occurs at another well, where will the money come from to fix it?
You can't predict the future and nobody predicted COVID-19 that has slowed the revenue stream, but maybe we could all learn a lesson that living in the present doesn't mean living in the future.
