FAITH — The Faith Board of Aldermen voted on Tuesday to pay out the contract with AC Schultes, the engineering company handling the construction and testing of the planned well and end the process of attempting to get the well online.

“When they started working on the well, things just didn’t go well. We were asked to have a change order, and you voted to do that. As the day progressed, it just became more and more change orders, where we went from around $27,000 to up to $42,511 just to make sure that they were able to do the test,” said Mayor Randall Barger.

That approximately $42,000 cost was for the town to complete the well-testing process, and included costs to modify the town’s already existing wells, numbered five and six, so that they could be effectively tested. However, Barger said that during the testing that occurred in late September the company discovered that wells five and six were connected to the new well, numbered seven.

“If they’re all pulling from the same vein, if that’s what you’re saying it really makes no sense for us to continue pumping money into testing it when we already know what it’s doing. So, I told him to stop for right now,” said Barger.

The “sunk costs” to abandon the project at the point where Barger asked AC Schultes to stop were $9,225. The total contract with the company for the project was approximately $121,500, of which the town has already paid $88,538. Town Clerk Karen Fink said that she would have to look into the details of the contract to determine if the town would be on the hook for the entirety of the final $32,962.

After voting unanimously to cancel the current project and end the contract, the members of the board and Waterworks Operator Scott Gardner said that this was not necessarily the end of the well project, but that town officials would work with their contracted engineering consulting firm, Garver, to plan out the future.

“If we cut it off with (AC Schultes) and pay them a clean bill, if Garver comes in and says, ‘oh we can do this,’ we can do that. We don’t have to go back to the old group. We can always go back and get it done. So, really at this time, we’re not accepting this whole thing as a total loss and done, we’ve just got to do a little bit of diligence,” said Mayor Pro Tem Dale Peeler.

Gardner said that the town could also submit a request to the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality to allow the town to be permitted for only four wells instead of the current five. Gardner said that even with only four wells, the town was producing enough water that they were over the state’s required surplus. Reducing the amount of permitted wells would allow the town to temporarily be in compliance with state requirements while looking into future possibilities.

“I would have (Garver) look at revising our permit to operate four wells so we are in compliance and everybody can back off. And then, when we get our ducks in a row and our figures together, make the application to add that additional well. Even though that would put us right back to where we were, it will put us right with the state,” said Gardner.

The funding for the project came from the federal American Rescue Plan Act, said Fink. The town’s ARPA funding would be down to a balance of $125,287 if the town is required to pay the contract with AC Schultes in full.

The process of getting the drawdown testing for the new well completed has been the source of consternation within the Faith Board of Aldermen for over a year. The testing was required by the state to test the capacity of the well in relation to the two nearby wells, and would have required running the wells continuously for at least 24 hours.