The Village of South Zanesville has been approved for a $200,700 state loan to design the replacement of aging waterlines, the Zanesville Times Recorder reported, in a project that covers 21,000 feet of waterline work in the Muskingum County village.
The loan, at 4.72% interest over five years, pays for the design phase of a package that also includes upgrades to a pressure regulating station, improvements to the Clay Street storage tank and a new pump station, according to the Times Recorder’s reporting. Design comes first: engineering the lines, the tank work and the pump station now is what allows the village to put construction out to bid later.
The South Zanesville award is part of $42.3 million in low-interest loans for seven projects recently awarded by the Ohio Water Development Authority, the Times Recorder reported. The authority is the state’s financing arm for local water and wastewater systems, lending to communities that need to replace infrastructure sized for another era.
For a village of South Zanesville’s size, 21,000 feet of waterline — nearly four miles of pipe — is a system-wide undertaking, not a spot repair. Waterlines installed decades ago lose capacity and reliability as they age, and small systems across Muskingum County face the same arithmetic: the pipe wears out on its own schedule, while the rate base paying to replace it stays small.
The design loan structure reflects how Ohio expects those projects to move. Rather than funding construction on a sketch, the authority finances the engineering up front over a short five-year term, so the village ends the design phase with biddable plans and a real construction price — the document it needs to seek the much larger construction financing that typically follows.
The package reaches beyond the pipes themselves. A pressure regulating station controls the force moving through the system, the Clay Street storage tank stores the village’s treated water, and a new pump station keeps that water moving — three pieces of the same system the new lines will feed, according to the project description reported by the Times Recorder.
What happens next is the design work itself: engineers will map the 21,000 feet of replacements and the tank, station and pump upgrades, and the village will learn the construction cost it has to finance when the design is complete. No construction timeline was included in the loan announcement.
Photo: David Brossard, CC BY-SA