GOSHEN — Elkhart County Redevelopment Commissioner members Thursday voted in favor of supporting the funding of a $440,000 wastewater treatment plant reconstruction project for Millersburg.

According to Town Manager Ben Eldridge, the Millersburg wastewater treatment facility is in dire need of repair with most of the components at least 35 years old, some of which are severely rusted and in questionable condition.

In order to remedy the situation, Eldridge put together a plan with the help of Triad Associates Inc., an engineering and architecture firm based in Indianapolis, to essentially gut the town’s current treatment facility and use its skeleton as the base for a near-new facility at the cost of approximately $440,000.

Eldridge went before the commission to request its assistance in paying some or all of the cost of the wastewater treatment project by utilizing funds available through the Millersburg II “Carriage” Tax Increment Finance District.

Tax Increment Financing, or TIF, is a public financing method that uses future gains in property taxes to subsidize current improvements within a specified district — in this case the area encompassing the now defunct Carriage Inc. RV manufacturing complex, which Eldridge indicated brings in about $160,000 to $180,000 in tax revenue per year.

“Without a functioning wastewater plant you’ve got nothing in Millersburg,” Eldridge said of the impact of a loss of the town’s treatment plant.” Who’s going to go there? Who’s going to build? Forest River’s not. Without a functioning wastewater plant nobody’s going to buy Carriage. Public utilities, that’s a no-brainer.”

Due to the fact that a failed wastewater treatment plant would have a significant negative impact on the economic viability of the town, commission members voted in favor of supporting the reconstruction of the plant through the use of TIF funds.

Commission members indicated they will now review the project’s particulars over the next month and come back with a recommendation for exactly how much of the total cost of the project they are willing to help fund, with suggestions ranging anywhere from 15 percent all the way up to 100 percent.

Broadband connection

In other action, commission members approved a request by Elkhart County Commissioner Mike Yoder and Com-Control Inc. of South Bend for the funding of a $10,000 broadband fiber connector at the intersection of C.R. 17 and Verdant Street in order to bring broadband access to businesses in that area.

“We have a business right now that would like to tap into the C.R. 17 corridor fiber, but we need a vault, a connecting point, at Verdant, which we didn’t install,” Yoder said of the request. “It’s about $10,000 that we’re estimating. The beauty of this is that we can go east and west. Of course we’d like to go east into that undeveloped area. So we thought that this might be a good, small project to initiate a working relationship with the Redevelopment Commission as we think about expanding that fiber network into that area.”

In addition to the $10,000 vault request, Yoder also brought up how the County Highway Engineering Department and Com-Control are looking at a plan for a possible $200,000 fiber expansion project that would connect the fiber system already in place along much of the C.R. 17 corridor to the Union Station broadband hub.

Such a connection, Yoder said, would essentially link Elkhart County to lines running through main hubs, including Chicago and beyond. What’s more, Com-Control representative Bryan Baker indicated that such a plan could be used to offer high speed broadband connectivity to as many as 500 businesses along the corridor as an avenue for economic development.

In raising the subject, Yoder indicated that as more research is done on the project, his hope is that the Redevelopment Commission may be able to provide funding assistance through TIF funds from TIFs located along the C.R. 17 corridor. That said, Yoder indicated that it is his intent to have the county highway department take the lead on the planning and research aspects of the plan for the time being, with the Redevelopment Commission coming in once all the particulars have been sorted out.

“Highway’s already well down the road on this I think,” Yoder said. “So lets let Bryan and the highway engineering department continue their work, and we’ll come back to you in a month.”