[P]OWNAL — The owners of the former Green Mountain Race Track property — which is being considered for a well that would replace a local water system’s PFOA-contaminated source — are proposing a deal for a commercial water bottling facility.
The idea is touted as creating income for the system operator, Pownal Fire District 2, and jobs for the area.
Stephen Soler, who represents the investor group that owns the 144-acre former track property, briefly discussed his proposal at a water district board meeting Monday. Soler said he’ll make a detailed offer once the district identifies a viable site to replace its contaminated well.
That search is expected to move on to preliminary test drilling before the end of May. Officials hope to gauge whether the water at a promising site on track property is free of perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, and that the output meets water system requirements.
Soler said after the meeting that, since two of three potential replacement well sites are on the track property, the owners are open to an arrangement in which excess district water is bottled and sold and the district receives income from the sales.
“There is a tremendous amount of water here, and it is clean,” Soler said.
The existing well that once served the racetrack is rated at 350 gallons per minute, officials have said, versus the rating of 97 gallons per minute for the current contaminated district well. That level itself is comfortably higher than the maximum amount used by the district system, which has about 450 customers.
Representatives of Unicorn Management Consultants, the consultants overseeing the search for a permanent replacement well, said at the meeting they hope to have a new well in service in about a year.
Soler said the bottling plant proposal could be adjusted to accommodate the state’s drinking water system regulations, as well as the needs of the district. That could include, he said, using more than one well on the track property to feed the water system.
A bottling plant could be an important job-creating economic development initiative, he said, and one that would take advantage of a natural resource. Soler said water above and below ground moves toward and under the racetrack site and eventually west into the Hoosic River — “where it now goes to New York state.”
District board members said Monday they hope to have the initial test drilling done this month so they can begin to consider the next steps in the process at their June 6 meeting.
Tim Raymond, operations and engineering section chief with the state’s Public Drinking Water Program, who attended the session, said the first step would be to proceed with 2-inch test wells at the preferred site, in an open area north of the racetrack grandstand.
“We are pretty certain there is no PFOA, but you have to look,” he said.
Once the purity and flow rate are confirmed, the district can apply for a state water supply permit and conclude a formal agreement with the landowner. The latter would have to include protections against certain uses for the surrounding property and a 200-foot buffer around the well head.
There will be an opportunity for public comment during the permit approval process.
Both Soler and Jim Winchester, who owns the third potential well site being considered, said they could foresee no objections to complying with the well site requirements. The Winchester land is on the opposite side of the Hoosic River, west of the track parcel.
The well search, along with the filtering system at the current well and private well testing and filtering, are being paid for by American Premier Underwriters Inc., of Cincinnati, which has assumed liability for the former factory north of the well head that the state considers the source of the PFOA contamination.
The former Warren Wire/General Cable factory produced coated wire and other products that often contained PFOAs, a suspected carcinogen. The property is owned by Mack Molding, which has used it primarily as a warehouse.
Unicorn Management was hired last year by APU to oversee the response to the contamination. While APU has agreed to cover certain expenses in the process, state officials have said the firm has not accepted liability for the contamination.
After PFOA contamination was discovered in Pownal last year, a no-drink order for the water district was issued in March. Water was found to have levels of 26 and 27 parts per trillion; the state limit is 20 parts per trillion for drinking water.
