OXFORD, Miss. (AP) — After years of living with discolored and inadequate water, Punkin Water Association customers have voted to dissolve the Mississippi company and switch their water services to the City of Oxford.
The PWA Board of Directors moved its monthly meeting to Tuesday and invited customers to decide the matter. Water service members voted 431-3 in favor of PWA dissolving and being acquired by the city, The Oxford Eagle reported.
PWA currently serves more than 1,200 customers. Over the years, the water system has received numerous complaints about the water which is filled with iron and manganese from the mineral rich land.
“There’s nowhere else for us to go. We have to get on Oxford water,” said PWA member Elisabeth Alexander. “I don’t see another solution to this problem.”
Alexander became an official customer of PWA in 2019 after moving homes. She had received Punkin water in the Deer Run area prior but the residents receive water differently which prevents them from experiencing problems other customers face.
Alexander said she never could have imagined the water conditions being as bad as they are.
“At first I thought it was nice because they build these houses and they give us these whole-home water filtration systems and I was like, ‘That’s nice,’” she said. “But I came to realize, they are giving that to us because they know there’s a problem. So we get these filters you’re supposed to change every six months, we have to change them every two to three months.”
The inadequate water quality has given PWA customers everything from discolored laundry to broken appliances. In addition, they see up to thousands of dollars in water bills because of errors in the PWA system.
Like many members, Alexander recognizes the water quality is not the PWA board’s fault, adding that the board has worked hard to fix many of the system's issues.
“I do not think that the board members — who are unpaid and they have volunteered to do this — I do not think that they have not tried everything that they can,” Alexander said. “They can only do so much and so much money us members can pay so they can do what needs to be done.”
The board had three alternatives before them: to drill a new well and drive up the prices for customers, hand over services to a for-profit company and triple the prices for customers or hand over their services to the city and the customers’ prices drop.
“The Oxford option served three issues for us,” Board President Glynn Ingram said. “The first issue is it cleaned up our water because we’re getting water from a really beautiful aquifer they have. It solves our water supply problem because they have a significant amount of supplied water and, lastly from a cost perspective, it keeps our costs the same or lower. It was a no-brainer for us to go that way.”
The city charges $9.78 for the first thousand gallons of water compared to Punkin which charges $22 for the first thousand. Punkin will be paying for the advertised cost for the pipe infrastructure and Oxford will not be able to charge PWA customers more than $14.10, so customers will save more money.
As a PWA member himself, Ingram said he and many of the board and community members spent a lot of time, energy and prayers getting to where they are now.
“It really is a high-quality solution for everybody,” he said. “Everybody wins.”
Even with the vote, the change will not be immediate. The city will officially take over servicing PWA customers around December or early in 2023.
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