With many water and sewer projects in the works, the Carroll County Public Service Authority (PSA) will seek a full-time resident professional engineer.

The PSA unanimously voted to advertise for the position during its Dec. 8 meeting. With several water and sewer projects in the works (Exit 1 in Lambsburg, Exit 19 in Wildwood to name just a couple), the thought is the PSA can save money by hiring an engineer on staff rather than bid out each individual project.

“We need a certified, staff-carrying professional engineer that has preferably 10 or more years experience with wastewater, with water, with designing systems, and other types of designs for the county,” PSA Chairman David Hutchins said. “We want someone that’s had at least three-to-five years of project management where he has been the lead project guy on some of these things.”

Any water or sewer project the PSA undertakes requires a significant amount of funding for Preliminary Engineering Reports (PERs), Hutchins said. Having a full-time professional engineer should save the county significant dollars, he said. Hutchins said major projects such as the Woodlawn-Galax Sewer Project will still require large engineering firms for project design. But the follow-up engineering and follow-up inspections that have to be paid for anyway could be done by a resident professional engineer.

As an example, Hutchins said the county will spend several thousand dollars with an engineering firm to design a conceptual drawing of a new recreation facility that has been discussed in recent months. Some of the highlights would include four quads with soccer, baseball, softball and football fields, and a water park.

“Someone has to design that. Guess what? You pay $30,000 to $70,000 or more for that conceptual design, not the hard engineering design that you can go build it, but just the concept,” Hutchins said. “If we had someone with that experience, there is the potential to get those things done and save those dollars.”

Having its own engineer would also allow the PSA and county to have designs for potential projects in a timely manner.

“When we need to do a Happy Hollow Self-Help Project, we want someone that can whip it out in a few minutes. Or if we want to repave, for example, the parking lot at the Farmers’ Market, they can whip that out and we don’t have to drag it out for months and almost lose Rural Development funding because we couldn’t get it done,” Hutchins said. “When we looked at two or three projects (at our last meeting), there was some number of hundreds of thousands of dollars for engineering. Can we save 20 percent of that? If we could save 20 or 30 percent of that, we could well more than pay for the position.”

The engineer would most likely be on the PSA staff, but would be shared with the county. Additionally, Hutchins said the PSA needs to prepare itself for the retirement of current PSA Executive Director Ray Hill. While Hutchins doesn’t know when Hill is planning to retire, he said the authority needs to be ready ahead of time.

“I think Ray is to be applauded for all he’s done, but we need to be planning for his retirement for the future. If we don’t start now, we won’t be there,” Hutchins said. “I think it’s the opinion of the board that we look for someone with an engineering background and someone that can work with the county and our GIS and other software (systems),” Hutchins said.

Hutchins believes President-elect Barack Obama is going to pump money into local economies for infrastructure. Carroll County needs to be ready for that.

“I think we need to be positioned today because we understand that there is going to be a lot of infrastructure funding released. Our board has made an absolute commitment that we are going to position ourselves to be able to try to take advantage of any available funding that might be there to move the county forward, to help the citizens of the county, and to relieve the tax burden,” Hutchins said. “The federal government is looking into ways to get money back into our local economies, and to do that I think there will be projects there. I don’t believe it will all be roads and bridges. I believe there is going to be water and sewer projects, I believe there is going to be broadband projects, anything that will help the economic growth. This board I believe, both the supervisors and the PSA, is going to do that and I think there is going to be some good things happen in our county because I believe we are forward thinking.”