Kanawha County advances eight-year effort to bring essential water services to Olcott

KANAWHA COUNTY, W.Va. (WCHS) — The Olcott water line extension project, which has been in the works for eight years, aims to service more than 100 customers in the Olcott area with clean drinking water.

“Close to 96%, 97% of Kanawha County has water that’s not well water, but for that last 3-4% we’re certainly working to try to make that happen,” Kanawha County Commission President Ben Salango said.

This extension is over seven miles and will include new fire hydrants. Now, all of the engineering is complete along with mapping.

“We had residents there and they wanted water. We started working very hard on it, working on funding, working on the engineering,” Salango said. “All of that is time consuming and expensive. Then we couldn’t get the necessary number of residents to sign up, which was a setback. We can engineer, we can map it and we can put it all down on paper, but until you’re ready to pay for it, it’s not going to be a reality.

“We are very close to being able to pay for everything,” he continued. “I think we’ll have that update in a couple months.”

About $10.5 million in funding has been secured so far. That number made possible following Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s announcement on Thursday of more funds being allocated to the project.

“Kanawha County Regional Development Authority, that’s an IJDC grant of a million dollars and a low interest loan of $9.2 million,” Morrisey said.

Salango said the project is continuing to move forward.

“I promised the folks in Olcott eight years ago and I’m sticking to my promise,” he said. “We’re going to have water in Olcott. We’re going to make it happen. We are very close, certainly much closer than we were a month ago, to making this a reality. I think we’ll have some more updates in the next few months.”

He said they’re working through bond issues and as soon as that’s complete, they’ll be able to move forward with the project.