Hopewell Borough has scheduled another special meeting for an informational session on the potential sale of the water system.
The special meeting scheduled for July 30 at 7 p.m. will be in person inside Borough Hall and also online through Zoom from the Hopewell Borough website.
“We are also now in the time period where the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) has approved the use of what we call the WIPA (Water Infrastructure Protection Act) process,” Mayor Ryan Kennedy said. “This approval is not an approval to sell the system. It is approval of us entering a process to explore.”
WIPA authorizes certain owners of water or wastewater systems to enter into a long-term lease contract or sell their water or wastewater assets to a private or public entity.
To qualify for the WIPA process, Hopewell Borough needed to qualify for one of five emergent conditions.
NJDEP determined in June that Hopewell Borough qualified with emergent condition No. 3 – “the present deficiency or violation of the maximum containment levels established pursuant to the Safe Water Drinking Act concerning the availability or potability of water, or concerning provision of water at adequate volume of pressure.”
Councilman David Mackie noted the NJDEP’s WIPA process path differs from the traditional sale bidding process.
“There is public notification where we publish their approval and there is a 45-day time period in which people can challenge that decision, they can submit a petition and request a referendum on that question,” he said.
Residents can challenge the NJDEP decision with a petition that has to be filed to the borough on or before Aug. 5. The petition would need at least 121 signatures from borough voters for a public referendum on the process.
Should someone file the petition with at least 121 signatures, the referendum question on the process would take place during the Nov. 5 general election. If there is no petition filed, the borough can proceed with the WIPA process on the potential sale of the water system.
Future steps in the WIPA process include submitting an RFQ (Request for Quote) to qualifying utilities that might want to buy the water system, then a draft of an RFP (Request for Proposal) would see what terms a utility might be willing to offer, Kennedy said.
Mackie added that in parallel with the WIPA process, the borough has applied for federal grants regarding water treatment systems for the borough’s well No. 6. They are currently in discussions with NJDEP about the grants.
“… We are exploring two options – possible sale of the system and the other to use those federal grants to put in treatment systems that would stay in operation,” he said. “We are trying to keep all our options open. The NJDEP has taken our grant request and they forwarded that to the U.S. Enviornmental Protection Agency (EPA) which is where the money comes from.
“…We don’t know if we are getting the grant or not, but the NJDEP is keeping our options open for us,” Mackie said. “We have not cut off any opportunities.”
