Elbridge Sets Aug. 6 Public Hearing on $848,000 Water Overhaul That Would Shrink the Jordan Road Tank by More Than Half

The Town of Elbridge wants to spend up to $848,000 to replace its 220,000 gallon Jordan Road water storage tank with one less than half that size, and residents of nine town water districts get their say Thursday night. Supervisor Kenneth Bush III and the Elbridge Town Board will take public comment at 7 p.m. on August 6 at Town Hall, 5 Route 31 in Jordan, according to a legal notice signed by Town Clerk Patricia Cooper and dated July 16, 2026.

The hearing covers a package of improvements the town proposes to make jointly across nine special districts: the Jordan Permissive Service Area Water District, the Elbridge Permissive Service Area Water District, the Champions Water District, Crossett Road Water Districts No. 1 and No. 2, the Hartlot Road Water District, the Sandbank Road Water District, the Route 5 East Water District, and the West Elbridge Water District. Under Section 202-b of state Town Law, the board must hold a hearing on the map, plan, and report, including the cost estimate, before it can move forward.

Three pieces of work are on the table. The headline item is the tank swap: the existing 220,000 gallon Jordan Road water storage tank would come down, and a new 94,000 gallon tank would go up, a reduction of 57 percent in storage capacity. The town would also replace the existing 10 inch transmission main with 1,450 linear feet of 12 inch high density polyethylene water main along Jordan Road between NYS Route 5 and the tank site. A third piece adds 2,200 linear feet of new 6 inch main to loop the system between McCallum Road and Meadow Road and between Meadow Lane and May Road. Add it up and crews would lay 3,650 feet of new pipe, about seven tenths of a mile. The looping work answers one item on the state’s 2023 deficiency list directly: dead end mains, which trap stagnant water at the edge of a system, disappear once the lines are connected into a loop.

A smaller tank sounds like a step backward until you look at the system’s diagnosis. When the Village of Elbridge, acting as lead agency, completed the state environmental review of the three municipality Joint Water System Improvements Project in July 2023, the published notice said the shared system “currently experiences critical deficiencies such as small diameter and dead end water mains, asbestos cement and galvanized steel water main, insufficient fire flows, low chlorine residuals, as well as aging infrastructure and highly variable pressure” from the City of Syracuse supply. Low chlorine residual is the kind of problem that oversized storage makes worse, because water that sits in a big tank longer loses disinfectant before it ever reaches a tap. The July 16 notice does not spell out the engineering rationale, but the map, plan, and report behind it, prepared by an engineer licensed by the State of New York, is available for inspection at the town clerk’s office during normal business hours.

The dollars are laid out district by district, and they are not split evenly. The Jordan Permissive Service Area Water District carries the largest expected share at $347,500, which works out to 41 cents of every project dollar. The Route 5 East Water District is next at $114,750, followed by the Champions Water District at $107,250, the Hartlot Road Water District at $85,000, the Elbridge Permissive Service Area Water District at $83,000, and the West Elbridge Water District at $79,500. The small districts pay small shares: $21,000 for Sandbank Road, $5,500 for Crossett Road No. 1, and $4,500 for Crossett Road No. 2. Those nine figures sum to exactly $848,000, the maximum estimated cost in the notice.

How each parcel gets billed depends on the district. For six of the nine, including both permissive service areas, Champions, Route 5 East, Sandbank Road, and West Elbridge, costs will be assessed on lots “in just proportion to the amount of benefit conferred,” the standard benefit basis formula. For Crossett Road No. 1, Crossett Road No. 2, and Hartlot Road, the assessment runs on an ad valorem basis, meaning it tracks assessed property value instead. Either way, the annual charges are sized to cover principal and interest on the bonds as they come due.

Thursday’s hearing is one move in a much bigger reconstruction of how the town and its two villages deliver water. The Joint Water System Improvements Project, shared by the Town of Elbridge, the Village of Elbridge, and the Village of Jordan, includes replacing small diameter mains and asbestos cement pipe, looping dead ends, improving the connections to the City of Syracuse conduits, installing three new water storage tanks, building two new booster pump stations, upgrading an existing pump station, decommissioning two existing tanks, and potentially extending municipal water service to the Champions Mobile Home Park. The Village of Elbridge issued a negative declaration for that project on SEQR review, finding no significant adverse environmental impact, in a notice published July 19, 2023. Christopher DeCola at the Village of Elbridge office, 210 West Main Street, is the listed project contact.

The state is paying a large piece of the freight. In the December 2023 round of Water Infrastructure Improvement Act awards, the NYS Environmental Facilities Corporation listed the Town of Elbridge for a $5,000,000 grant against a net project cost of $12,889,600, and the Village of Elbridge for another $5,000,000 grant against $8,390,400, both for the joint water system improvements and both drawn from Environmental Bond Act funds. That is $10 million in state grants against a combined $21.3 million in project costs for the water side alone. The Village of Jordan landed separately on the same award list with a $9,485,200 intermunicipal grant toward its $23,713,000 Route 5 and East Brutus Street sewer extension. For scale, the Village of Weedsport, one town west in Cayuga County, received the same $5,000,000 WIIA maximum for its own $18,750,000 water system overhaul in that round.

The setting for all this is one of Onondaga County’s quietest corners, and one that is changing unevenly. The 2020 Census put the Town of Elbridge at 5,733 residents, down about 5.8 percent since 2000, according to the joint comprehensive plan the town and both villages drafted together. The villages moved the other way: the Village of Elbridge grew about 8.3 percent to 1,203, and the Village of Jordan grew about 9.1 percent over twenty years to 1,447. That plan, funded through a NYS Department of State Smart Growth Comprehensive Planning grant that the Central New York Regional Planning and Development Board pursued on the municipalities’ behalf, also flags what is coming: Micron’s planned chip fabrication campus in the Town of Clay, less than 15 miles to the east, is expected to push new housing demand toward towns exactly like this one. Water capacity decisions made at Thursday’s hearing will shape what that growth can look like along Route 5 and Jordan Road.

The three boards have built standing machinery for the water work. Joint board meetings on the Municipal Water Project, bringing together the town, the Village of Elbridge, and the Village of Jordan, run on the third Tuesday of each month at 9 a.m., and project documents are available for review at the village and town offices. The town board itself, Bush plus councilors Jeremy Chilson, Joe Farrugia, Mary Jo Davis, and Todd Platten, normally meets the first and third Thursday of each month at 7 p.m., but its posted calendar skips regular sessions in July and August. That makes the August 6 session a specially noticed one: the board is coming to Town Hall in the middle of its summer break for this hearing.

The environmental box is already checked. The notice states the improvements were previously determined to be a Type I action under the State Environmental Quality Review Act and that the work will not result in any significant adverse environmental effects. SEQRA compliance materials sit with the map, plan, and report at the clerk’s office.

For ratepayers in the nine districts, the practical questions to bring Thursday are the ones the notice invites: whether the benefit formulas land fairly on individual parcels, what the annual assessment will look like once bonds are issued, and how construction along Jordan Road between Route 5 and the tank will be staged. The board is required to hear all interested persons before acting. If the board moves ahead after Thursday’s testimony, the notice lays out what follows: costs get apportioned among the nine districts each year, then assessed on the individual lots and parcels within each district, in amounts sufficient to cover the bond payments. Nothing in the notice sets a construction start date, so the schedule question belongs on the floor Thursday too.

The documents are open for inspection now at the town clerk’s office at 5 Route 31 in Jordan during normal business hours. The hearing gavels in at 7 p.m. Thursday, August 6.