Henifin says the capital city's water system is "light-years" ahead of where it was a year ago when he was given control but acknowledges there's still a lot of work to do over the next three years the federal order will remain in place.
“There's still plenty of challenges with the system,” Henifin said. “And over the next several years, we'll see the investment of the federal dollars that we're getting go into the system to make it stable, make sure we can retain pressure for everybody and keep that moving forward.”
Henifin's corporation, JXN Water, was also given control of the city's sewer system in October. Like the water system, the city's sewers are plagued with infrastructure failures resulting in hundreds of overflows across the city. Henifin says repairing both systems concurrently is the most efficient solution despite the extra workload for JXN Water.
“We don't have federal funding for the sewer system, but we can apply as much federal funding for the water system as we can to offset local revenue needs, and then apply those local revenues to the sewer system,” Henifin said. “If they weren't working together, I don't know that we'd be able to do that.”
Starting next year, JXN Water will begin shutting off water connections for people not paying their bills. There are also up to 50,000 households who receive water services, but do not have an account with the city. JXN Water will be seeking back payments from those consumers. Henifin says they've focused on smaller repairs due to funding limitations, but increasing revenue will allow them to tackle major repairs the systems need.
“We have to have that local revenue come in, and then we'd love to be making better and bigger investments in the sewer system than the city was able to do in the past.”
With the water system stabilized, Henifin expects progress in repairing both systems to accelerate next year.
