HADLEY — Even with uncertainty around various funding sources, the Select Board is continuing to press ahead with a $9 million project to refurbish the municipal water tanks at Mount Warner and Mount Holyoke.
In a unanimous vote Wednesday, the board gave the go ahead for Tighe & Bond engineers of Westfield to get to the 90% design stage for what is expected to be the full replacement of the tanks, which are located off Mount Warner Road near North Hadley, and off Route 47 in the Hockanum section of town.
“I think it’s very important for the town to move forward with this,” said Department of Public Works Director Scott McCarthy, who explained that it’s not in Hadley’s best interest to halt the work.
McCarthy said officials will continue to look for grants and other funding to meet the demands from the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, which is requiring the town to at least rehabilitate the tanks.
“We have to do something, obviously,” McCarthy said.
Focus on the water tanks started in the spring of 2022, when voters approved $310,000 to paint both tanks. But since that time, with the paint work increasing to a price of $2 million to $3 million, and an unknown lifespan for this work on the bare steel tanks, the town has moved instead to full replacement as a less expensive long-term solution.
The glass-fused steel tanks that would be built could last for 75 to 100 years.
Jennifer Reynolds, a project manager with Tighe & Bond, told the Select Board that the preliminary design has included 30% stage drawings.
The company, Reynolds said, is now finalizing an opinion of cost and doing hydraulic modeling after field work over the summer that included examining the pros and cons of putting the new tank on an alternate site at Mount Warner.
Having a site adjacent to the current tank would allow sequencing to take place, keeping two tanks in service at all times. Once the Mount Warner work is done, then the rehabilitation work would move to Mount Holyoke.
Reynolds said the alternate site gives flexibility to building the tank, stabilizes the town’s water supply and gets the municipal use entirely off private property.
But the alternate site has challenges. McCarthy said the questions are how the costs of building a new road, and moving the pipes that distribute water.
Jeff Faulkner, project director for Tighe & Bond, said a $9 million total cost remains doable, though he said 2026 is an interesting environment that has raised complications for grants.
The company also learned that the U.S. Department of Agriculture would only offer Hadley a loan, not a grant, due to the relative wealth of the community. This came after a low-interest loan with principal forgiveness and up to 40% of costs reimbursed was presented to Hadley voters at annual Town Meeting in 2024.
At the time of approval, the hope had been to replace the annual $330,000 in borrowing for the Callahan well treatment center project, which comes to an end in fiscal year 2027, with the estimated annual $365,000 borrowing for the water tanks replacement.
Interim Town Administrator Michael Mason said the town will have to find a funding source to make the project work.