NASHVILLE – It’s been said that a looming execution concentrates the mind wonderfully.
Today might be the day for the Hamilton County Water and Wastewater Treatment Authority to see whether that’s true.
Inundated by complaints over the authority’s operations, two local lawmakers are proposing to put WWTA under the same legislative “sunset” review as state agencies – a move that could end its existence on July 1, 2019, and hand over its functions to Hamilton County government.
The intent, said sponsor Bo Watson, the speaker pro tempore of the Tennessee Senate, is “to get us to start thinking about, do we need to have another structure than what we currently have? It also creates a sense of urgency for the wastewater authority to say, ‘Hey, we got to start working through these problems that we have.'”
WWTA’s litany of woes includes a disruption to customer billing that has hurt its finances as well as expensive state and federal clean water orders to prevent raw sewage from flowing into the Tennessee River, the source of many residents’ drinking water, during heavy rains.