SAN BENITO — The questions are piling up and there aren’t any immediate answers.
Will the water keep flowing? How long can the old water plant keep operating? Will there be more problems and boil notices?
While those answers are unknown, one is becoming clearer. It appears city officials won’t reconsider their 2014 decision to shut down the city’s $17.9 million water plant built in 2009.
Instead, the city is now working on a $3 million project to renovate its 90-year-old water plant.
“That’s our priority right now,” City Commissioner Esteban Rodriguez said yesterday.
“We have to bring that up to par. We’re going to get it back to where it used to be.”
The old plant’s “renovation is an investment for the plant to continue operations for another 20 years,” city spokeswoman Martha McClain said in an earlier statement.
Officials plan to dip into a $12.6 million reserve account to fund the plant’s upgrade.
In 2014, the city turned to the old plant as its primary water source after city commissioners shut down the water plant opened in 2009.
Mayor Celeste Sanchez, who did not serve on the City Commission at the time, said the decision to shut down the new plant was made because its filter membranes were too costly while orders for membranes took their Australian manufactures as long as eight months to deliver.
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