Manassas Park’s water system needs replacing, but city debt stands in the way

MANASSAS PARK — Massive city debt has crippled badly needed updates to Manassas Park’s water system, city officials confirmed.

At least half of Manassas Park’s water system pipes are 65 years old, laid when installation was mostly unregulated and not held to particular standards. As a result, breaks are common occurrences, especially as cold weather approaches.

Calvin O’Dell, director of community development and public works, said that most of the water breaks occur in the original Manassas Park subdivision — the western end of the city, where homes were built between 1953 to the early 1960s. The groundwork is similarly dated and presents challenges.

Modern regulations for pipe placement usually require “overexcavating,” where the installer digs deeper to find more suitable conditions. O’Dell said that Manassas Park has “unique conditions,” with a large number of shallow rock beds, and many pipes were laid right up against these rock beds in the ‘50s.

When the ground shifts — typically due to sudden temperature changes — issues and pipe breaks occur. The ground will shrink and swell with temperatures, moving the pipes against the rock. “It’s far worse in the winter,” O’Dell said. “We tend to call it ‘break season.’”

Most of the pipes are made from cast-iron or ductile iron, except for the original Manassas Park subdivision, which has steel pipes. Steel is more susceptible to corrosion, and ductile iron is now widely considered to be a more durable and effective choice.

Despite the frequent breaks, O’Dell said the quality of the city’s water is not in jeopardy. “If you occasionally have areas where chlorine is low, you just move more water through the system to bring the levels back up,” he said. Small amounts of chlorine are used in water systems to kill water-borne diseases.

Phased improvements to the water system have been going on for decades, O’Dell explained, but are hindered by the slow turnaround and lack of funds. “We are currently on what we consider ‘phase six,’ and our staff has already turned in final comments for the design,” he said. “It’s been in design for over a year and we’ll just have to see when we can fund the capital to actually execute it.”

These phases are general improvements to the water system. There are a total of eight phases. Phase six will focus on “getting rid of troubled underground infrastructure where leak rates are far too high to be acceptable,” said O’Dell — a section in the western part of the city.

“I would like to see future phases focused on areas with higher than acceptable break rates, so we can get rid of the troubled steel pipes as we want,” said O’Dell.

Replacing pipes is labor-intensive and expensive. In addition to the cost of the materials and labor, replacing pipes usually involves disrupting a neighborhood for a long period of time.

“You’re not going to save any money replacing pipes until you’re seeing two or three breaks per winter in a small two or three-block area. At that point, your leak rate and water loss goes up,” O’Dell explained. “If you don’t have that many breaks, you actually lose money by going in and digging it up.”

O’Dell estimates that each two or three street project costs millions of dollars to replace. He said that no federal or state monies are available for water system use at this time.

O’Dell would “like to see the city working toward a long-term plan that will get rid of the aging infrastructure within the original Manassas Park subdivision.” But he cautioned, “if it’s not broken, you don’t spend millions to fix it.”

Years of cumulative debt and operating in the red is what landed Manassas Park in this situation, city manager Laszlo Palko explained. Right now, the city is drowning in about $120 million in debt, and loan repayment amounts over the next five years are expected to grow to leave the city strapped to pay for anything new initiatives. 

“The city is badly in debt,” he said. “We’re over leveraged and that causes huge debt payments each year that prevents our public works department from being able to execute their plans.”

Palko said a string of loans in the late 1990s through the 2000s to build public facilities “beyond what the city could afford” was responsible for the majority of the debt. “The water and sewer fund have not been the financial burden for the city, instead it has been the general fund debt associated with new facilities,” Palko said.

“Our debt to operating budget ratio is at 25 percent, whereas every other jurisdiction in Virginia is under 10 percent,” said Palko. “We’re struggling financially.”

In 2012, residents saw their water and sewer rates double from a base rate of $24 per month to $52 per month. Despite this increase, it could still be a significant amount of time before that money can go to water system fixes.

“The money has to go to debt,” said Palko.

The council is prioritizing drastically reducing its debt, with a strategy that involves “focusing on downtown development, along with boosting reserve balances so we can fully separate our cash position from water and sewer cash,” he explained.