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Due to water usage being down, the revenue for the Warsaw Wastewater Treatment Utility is down.
Friday, Utility Manager Brian Davison presented the wastewater treatment and stormwater utilities’ 2026 budget guidelines to the Board of Public Works and Safety. Both were approved 2-0, with Mayor Jeff Grose absent due to illness.
On the wastewater budget guidelines, Davison said, “We’ve seen a tremendous drop in water usage this year, to the tune that our revenue’s probably down half a million dollars. I’ve talked to Indiana American Water and their water production is down a big volume. A couple industries have greatly reduced the volumes of water they’re using, so that has really impacted our budget based off of revenue. Revenue is probably back to 2021 levels, somewhere in that area.”
He pointed out the estimated 2026 revenue ($8,946,000) is below the 2026 budget total of $9,148,890.
“I spoke with Mayor Grose and we’re intentionally spending a little bit of our reserves so we can keep up on the sewer rehab that we’ve been doing over the last several years, and then we’re going to evaluate what we may need to do to fix this, or if the water usage goes back up. We’re looking at that,” Davison said.
He said they’re probably $500,000 to $600,000 down in revenue from what was projected, and that includes adding the Tippecanoe-Chapman Regional Sewer District service on. “If it wasn’t for that, we’d be down even more,” Davison said.
Councilwoman Diane Quance asked if there were any thoughts as to why the water usage decrease happened this year.
“No. A couple industries have slowed down or just done water conservation that worked really, really well. One used to use about 300,000 gallons a day and now they’re using 100,000 gallons a day, so that’s a lot of it right there,” Davison replied.
Board member George Clemens said they’ve talked before about there being no way to forecast water usage.
“We have no way to know,” Davison said, unless an industry tells them that they’re going to use less.
“Well, I definitely think it’s worth keeping up with what we’re doing to rehab and maintain our pipes. That was a long time in coming and we don’t want to let that down to get to where we were before,” Quance said.
Davison said they’ve seen a tremendous benefit with the rehab they’ve done throughout the years.
After the board approved the wastewater budget guidelines, they reviewed the stormwater budget guidelines. Its budget guideline for 2026 is $1,760,000, which also was approved 2-0.
In other business, the board approved:
• A contract with Brown Equipment Co. for camera truck IBK-Hardware upgrades for $124,914, as requested by Davison.
“We have two camera trucks. This is our oldest truck. Typically, we replace the trucks every 10 years. This one is 10 years old now. The chassis and most of the equipment in the truck is still in good working order, so what we want to do is sort of freshen it up, rehab it, bring it up to date,” he said. “It’s a lot of new cameras, so our old truck and newer truck will both be the same. Right now, we can’t interchange the equipment between the two trucks.”
The last time a new truck was bought it cost about $400,000, Davison said. He said they thought it best to rehab the older truck this time.
• A contract with Christopher B. Burke Engineering LLC for MS4 on-call services for an amount not to exceed $40,000, as requested by Davison. He said they’ve had the agreement for years and he didn’t think they used near that amount this year.
• Another stormwater agreement, with Stantec Consulting Services Inc., for $16,300, as requested by Davison. He said Stantec services all the city’s sites that they’ve done improvements to, such as shoreline restorations, ponds, weed control, etc.
• A contract with Aquatic Weed Control for $2,265 for season-long pond care of Kelly Park pond, as requested by Davison.
