The wellhouse for a city water well on Madison Avenue. Engineers are proposing that the city drill a new shallower well on this site. Another well is proposed for the property around the Wethersfield water tower. [Photo by Michael Berry]

“The can has been kicked down the road repeatedly,” Mayor Gary Moore said. “Now it’s gone as far as it can go.”

That’s how Moore described the position the city of Kewanee is in with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) over a pollutant in the city’s water supply. Removing that pollutant, called chlorides, could cost more than $8 million, the City Council learned Monday.

For years, the IEPA has warned city officials that the level of chlorides in Kewanee’s water is too high.

The chloride level has been measured where water js discharged from the city’s wastewater treatment plant into a tributary of the Spoon River.

Engineers Scott DeSplinter and Tom Beckley told the council Monday that the chlorides occur naturally in the water pumped from the city’s four wells. Those wells go down more than 2,000 feet to an aquifer with high levels of chlorides and other pollutants.

DeSplinter said if the city drills a couple of shallower wells, they should produce enough low-chloride water to bring the overall chloride level down to an acceptable level.

Each of those wells would cost nearly $4 million, DeSplinter said. He also said the membranes in the city’s two water treatment plants need to be replaced, a job that would cost a little over $1 million. 

The city would have to issue bonds to raise the money for all this work, and Beckley described how the city could cover the bond payments by increasing the utility bills residents pay.

The charge for water on the average utility bill is just just under $60. Under the engineers’ proposal, that would increase to about $73 if the bills were raised enough to cover the cost of the chloride project.

Beckley said the rate increase should be high enough to also cover a program of replacing water lines and valves annually. Many water lines in the city, he noted, are more than 100 years old, and replacing them would make it easier to repair any main breaks that occur.

The good news, DeSplinter and Beckley said, is that IEPA offers low-interest loans for projects like the one Kewanee needs. In some cases, they said, the state agency will even forgive the loan after a time.

“For years and years, the city has just put band-aids on things,” Moore said, and he added that the time has come for the council to take “necessary actions” to solve the problem.