The Town of Crothersville will receive a $700,000 grant from the Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs (OCRA) for water and sewer improvements.
Lt. Governor Suzanne Crouch made the announcement that Crothersville was among 24 rural Hoosier communities will receive more than $15.3 million in federal grant funding to improve water infrastructure.
The Crothersville project will help build a new wet weather overflow main, install an in-line hydrodynamic stormwater separator, construct a duplex wet weather pumping station and force main, modify existing plant surge basins with concrete wall cores and many other key improvements.
The wastewater work is being required by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) as a part of the towns Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) agreement.
The total cost of the state mandated project is estimated at $6 million.
Town Council President Danieta Foster said that to pay for the project there will be a sewer rate increase. “But this grant will soften the blow,” she said.
Crothersville is the smallest of the 109 CSO communities in Indiana that are being ordered by IDEM to upgrade its system to prevent untreated wastewater overflows.
Back when the town’s wastewater system was constructed in the 1950’s, the conventional engineering wisdom at the time was to combine sanitary and storm sewers. That way, when a heavy rain event occurred, it would flush out the sewer system but left untreated sanitary sewer effluent to flow downstream.
Building a wastewater system big enough to treat all combined sewer waste is less costly that separating and building a stand alone storm sewer system, said Dan Wright, engineer with FBPH, the town’s engineering firm.
“By investing in our state’s water infrastructure, we are laying the foundation for regional growth and prosperity,” said Lt. Gov. Crouch. “These grants are supporting projects that are crucial to rural communities’ continual economic development and improving the quality of life for its residents.”
The State of Indiana distributes Community Development Block Grant funds to rural communities, which assists local government with various community projects such as: infrastructure improvement, downtown revitalization, public facilities and economic development.
“The leadership of these grant recipients embodies strategic planning, hard work and dedication to improving their communities,” said Matt Crouch, Interim Executive Director of OCRA. “Proper planning is necessary to ensure Hoosier’s quality of life can grow as we are coping through a pandemic.”
Funding for OCRA’s CDBG programs originates from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant program and is administered for the State of Indiana by OCRA.
