The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

THE Water and Sewerage Corporation (WSC) is aiming to expand its customer base “as much as possible”, its general manager telling Tribune Business yesterday it wanted to win back the 60 per cent of New Providence residents currently using private wells.

Glen Laville said the Corpopration’s major thrust towards greater operational efficiency was reducing non-revenue water, or water losses from its system before it reached the consumer.

The corporation signed an $83 million non-revenue water reduction (NRW) contract with Miya/Veritec last February, and Mr Laville said: “The company is on the ground now doing a comprehensive survey of the system.

“Once they do that they will provide us with a report, we sit down, discuss and and finalise the strategy to deal with the losses. That’s moving in accordance with our schedule.

“As far as our wastewater master plans and rehabilitation works for New Providence, we are still in the process of reviewing and evaluating proposals, and so we hope that we would be awarding something on that - possibly as early as September.”

Mr Laville added: “Even as we reduce water losses, we expect that our demands will continue to increase.

“Obviously we have to expand our customer base as much as possible. We only supply about 40 per cent of residents. We hope that as we reduce water losses, as we make the legislative changes for the sector, improve our efficiencies and service, that we can get more customers to come on board.

“What the reduction in water losses will do for us is defer any sort of expansions over the next few years, but there is an existing demand there that we don’t service right now. As we improve our service we hope to bring those people on to the system. In terms of population I would say possibly about 60 per cent of persons on New Providence have private wells; it could be even more. Some persons use our service and private wells. We still do have some areas where we do not provide service, where there are no water and sewerage pipelines.”

Mr Laville said that the Corporation was also looking towards sector reform. He added:

“There is also the regulatory part of it, which is the sector reform to get us under URCA and get an independent environmental regulator.

“We are only in the early phases of that. We are a little behind schedule on that but we should be able to catch up by the end of the year. One of the things we have to do is form a committee that will oversee the implementation of draft legislation, developing and establishing the environmental consultant. A committee has to be formed initially, and that’s what we are in the process of doing right now.”

Mr Laville added: “We have produced some draft legislation, and what are going to be doing is presenting that to the Government.

“What that will help to do is help the Corporation to run more on a commercial basis. We would have to meet certain minimum criteria and we would have to go to URCA for any sort of tariff adjustments that we would need to make in order to achieve the things URCA is telling us we have to do.

“That’s a very important part of trying to turn the Corporation around. It’s just a matter of having those discussion with government, trying to get the legislation passed and actually establishing the regulator. URCA is already there, but obviously we would have to bring in the expertise in the water and sewerage sector in order to address us.”