Above: Itty-bitty Trout Creek. Source: Google Maps.
The tiny Delaware County hamlet of Trout Creek, in the town of Tompkins, will soon begin work on a community sewer system funded by the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. At a recent meeting, the town of Tompkins accepted a $3.1 million bid by the Bovina-based LaFever Excavating to do the work.
Trout Creek lies roughly three miles upstream from New York City's Cannonsville Reservoir.
According to a press release from the Catskill Watershed Corporation, a nonprofit that manages city-funded water quality and local economic development projects in the New York City watershed, the system will serve 55 properties.
The system, which will come to a total cost of $3,432,871 -- or roughly $62,416 per connected property -- is cheaper than a full wastewater treatment plant would be, said CWC spokesperson Diane Galusha.
"There's not a building, there's no filtration process," Galusha said. "Instead of building fifty separate septic systems, each with its own leach field, every house will get a concrete septic tank where the solids get held, and the liquids get sent to a series of community leach fields."
The DEP originally set aside $6.5 million in a block grant for the project, the CWC press release stated.
Officials at CWC hope that community sewer infrastructure will make it easier to build and invest in little hamlets like Trout Creek, said Galusha.
"One of the major reasons we're doing this, in addition to protecting water quality, is to make these hamlets more attractive to modest economic development, and get the infrastructure that would make it easy for folks to decide to build there or do business there," she said.
If all goes according to plan, construction on the system will begin this fall, and the system will be complete in late 2013.
Trout Creek is listed as eighth in a list of fifteen hamlets and villages that New York City considers a priority for building similar systems, via the CWC's Community Wastewater Management Program.
