Villa Rica has been awarded $425,000 in federal stimulus funds dispersed by the Georgia Environmental Facilities Authority for municipal water system improvements.

The funds, allocated to Georgia from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, will be used to tie in water lines at Rockmart Road and Industrial Boulevard to a 10-inch water line that had previously been run at Old Town Road, looping the northern part of the city’s water system. The project will also include a short stretch of water line on Conners Road from the railroad tracks to the Mirror Lake water tank.

“These projects will allow us to get water over to the Mirror Lake side of town more efficiently,” said Eric Lacefield, Villa Rica’s deputy city manager of utilities.

The project hasn’t yet started, but the low bidder, Lance Construction, waited to proceed until the city was sure the stimulus funds would be awarded. That bid was officially awarded last Tuesday.

Georgia local governments expressed a tremendous amount of interest in the federal stimulus funds. Cities and counties submitted more than 1,600 clean water, drinking water and green projects with a total cost that exceeded $6 billion. Total available funding for Georgia projects through the federal program is $144 million on a first-come, first-serve basis.

“I’m very excited we were able to get these funds,” City Manager Larry Wood said. “There was a lot of competition for this money. We’ve applied for some of these in the past and haven’t been successful, so this is great.”

Wood gave a lot of the credit to Rindt-McDuff, the city’s engineering contractor, for putting together a winning project proposal. GEFA will provide the entire $425,000 project cost and Villa Rica will be forgiven 40 percent, or $170,000, of the loan’s principal. The city will then be required to pay 3 percent interest on a 15-year loan of $255,000.

“It has been a lengthy process, but we’re happy we are at the end,” Lacefield said.

GEFA was set up to help communities prepare for economic growth and development through the provision of low interest loans. In February, Congress approved and President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which included a substantial investment in two federal programs administered by GEFA for water and sewer infrastructure projects. The Clean Water State Revolving Fund (CWSRF) finances wastewater and water pollution abatement projects and the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF) finances drinking water projects.

“It’s going to save our water and sewer customers some money,” Wood said. “They would have had to pay for it otherwise (through an increase in water and sewer rates) because we had this marked down as a capital project that needed to be done.”

The unprecedented amounts of subsidy in the stimulus financing terms are aimed at helping Georgia meet the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s short-term goals of job creation and economic stimulus.

“We hope this project will aid the economy by creating some jobs and get some people working in Villa Rica,” Lacefield said. “And it’s a project that will help our water system, so we’re excited to get started.”