Westminster?s seven-month building moratorium will end next week when city and state officials sign an agreement on how the Carroll County seat will solve its water shortage.
“It means we got a way out of the impasse,” Westminster Council Member Robert Wack said.
In September, the Maryland Department of the Environment asked Westminster to halt development until the city could comply with new state requirements that municipalities have enough water to satisfy a worst-case drought.
Westminster?s water system, which serves 30,000 residents, “is not only inadequate to meet the existing demand during a record drought year, but also inadequate during less-substantial droughts,” Robert Summers, director of MDE?s Water Management Administration, wrote in a Sept. 21 letter to Westminster Mayor Thomas Ferguson.
Maryland?s record drought occurred from 1964 to 1966, but Westminster attracted the state?s attention more recently in 2002, when the city had to spend $120,000 to bring in water on five or six trucks for several weeks, according to Carroll County?s Hazard Mitigation Plan.
“After months of working with MDE, we have reached an agreement on how much water there is in Westminster?s system and how much water is expected to be after Westminster completes the improvements we have been talking about doing,” Council Member Gregory Pecoraro said.
“That calculation should acknowledge that Westminster is completing all the actions to cure the deficit and add capacity in the system for additional connections,” he said.
Wack said the agreement is just the beginning, as the city must still figure out how to pay for several multimillion-dollar water projects, including the construction of a pipeline from Medford quarry to the city reservoir.
Summers and Ferguson will sign the agreement April 3.
