By Tabitha Evans Moore
Editor & Publisher

LYNCHBURG, Tenn. — In Metro Planning & Zoning Commission, Metro Council, and Metro Utilities Department (MUD) Board meeting each month, Metro Moore County’s elected and appointed officials keep coming back to the same question over and over — how much water does Moore County actually have?

And it’s an important question — one that planning officials must answer before approving subdivisions, and high density housing projects in Lynchburg and one that MUD officials must answer in order to continue providing it’s largest single customer, The Jack Daniel Distillery, and well as nearly 3,000 existing households in Moore County.

Every month, the MUD produces a number. It tells the board how much water was treated, how much was billed and how much disappeared somewhere in between. That number determines what ratepayers pay, what the state requires and what gets built — or doesn’t — in Moore County.

But according to a copy of an email discussed in Tuesday’s MUD Board meeting and obtained by The Lynchburg Times, that number may not be certain.

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A GAP NOBODY CAN EXPLAIN

Cameron Ray, an area certified public accountant, visited the MUD office on June 1 at the request of the board to review the department’s billing and accounting systems. Working alongside Office Manager Katie Goodwin, Ray spent the day examining how MUD tracks water from the moment it leaves the treatment plant to the moment it appears on a ratepayer’s bill.

What he found raised more questions than it answered.

Over a five-day sample period, Ray compared the volume of water pumped from the lake, treated at the plant and then recorded as used by customers. The amount moving from Tims Ford Lake into the facility was consistent. But between treated water and billed water, he found a gap — an average variance of 150,000 to 300,000 gallons every day.

“The usage between the treated water and the used water each day has roughly an average variance of 150–300K gallons per day,” Ray wrote in a follow-up email to Goodwin and board member Greg Guinn, according to a copy of the email obtained by The Lynchburg Times.

Ray was careful to note that the variance may not represent water physically leaving the pipes. Timing mismatches between reporting cycles, software gaps and meter posting issues could all be inflating the figure.

At the June MUD Board meeting, board member Greg Guinn shared Ray’s findings with the full board. The math landed hard. At the low end of Ray’s range — 150,000 gallons per day — that is 4.5 million gallons per month unaccounted for. Board member Charles Johnston put it in plainer terms: “That’s like 16, 17 percent.” At the high end, the gap represents more than 9 million gallons a month.

According to MUD, water loss figures for May were 41% with 23,780,000 gallons produced and 2,080,000 bought for a total of 25,860,000 gallons. Of that, they report that  15,251,886 gallon were sold to ratepayers with another 674,159 accounted for in-house use — leaving 9,933,935 lost.

At residential water rates of $9.94 per 1,000 gallons, the mysterious 4.5 million unaccounted gallons represents roughly $44,700 a month in water that either left the system or was never properly captured in the billing chain. At the high end, that figure climbs past $89,000 per month — more than $1 million a year.

For a water system with big infrastructure needs and a small number of ratepayers, that’s a big deal — especially considering that the Tennessee Comptroller’s office monitors such things closely to insure fiduciary responsibility.

FOUR SYSTEMS, NO COMMON LANGUAGE

Part of the problem, Ray found, is structural. MUD currently relies on four separate software programs to manage its water data, and none of them communicate directly with the others.

QuickBooks and the billing software are the most integrated of the four, but even there Ray identified gaps. A report he pulled showed no meter activity recorded for roughly 640 meters in the meter software — though the readings did appear to be populating in the billing system. Ray suspects the manually read meters may require a separate posting step that isn’t being completed consistently.

There is also a timing problem. The treatment plant reports treated gallons on a calendar month basis. The billing cycle runs on a different schedule. That means the monthly water loss comparisons the board reviews at each meeting are not true apples-to-apples comparisons — they may be comparing numbers from different time periods.

Ray recommended MUD explore a monthly reconciliation process to align the treatment reporting with the billing period, and suggested the board consider whether its meeting date — the second Tuesday of each month — might be moved to allow more time for data adjustments to be entered before reports are generated.

He also flagged the Booneville Road repair. Despite recent work on a known leak in that area, Ray said data he reviewed suggested “it might be larger than what is being estimated.”

Ray also noted he has a contact at Jacobs Engineering with a department that evaluates water systems and helps utilities identify problems. He offered to make the introduction if the board wants to pursue it.

THE NUMBER THAT MATTERS BEYOND THE OFFICE

The uncertainty doesn’t stay inside MUD’s office. It flows directly into every conversation about Moore County’s future.

According to MUD officials on Tuesday, it is permitted to treat and distribute 1.2 million gallons of water per day. The system is currently producing around 800,000 gallons daily. That gap — 400,000 gallons — might sound like plenty of room to grow. But the state requires utilities to begin planning for expansion before they reach 80 percent of permitted capacity, which for MUD means 960,000 gallons per day. That puts the real planning headroom at roughly 160,000 gallons.

The average Moore County household uses between 4,000 and 4,500 gallons of water per month, according to MUD’s own meter data — roughly 133 to 150 gallons per day. Using a more conservative planning figure of 200 gallons per day per home, that 160,000-gallon headroom translates to approximately 800 new residential connections before MUD would need to expand its treatment capacity.

Subtract the 82 already approved tiny houses being built along Main Street, the proposed 42-unit townhome project just down the road and scores of small developers swiping up farmland with smaller subdivisions in mind and Metro could be over a fifth of the way there.

Planning Commission Chair Dexter Golden attended Tuesday’s meeting and pressed MUD board members on exactly that question. Golden said the planning commission needs a reliable number before it can make informed decisions about development approvals.

“I just want to make sure that we don’t put ourselves in a bind,” Golden told the board. “I don’t know if we have enough water.”

The board couldn’t give him a firm answer. The biggest complicating factor, multiple board members acknowledged, is Jack Daniel’s. The distillery is MUD’s largest water customer by a significant margin, and its future consumption is unpredictable. Board member Glenn Thomas noted that newer lower-proof Jack Daniel’s products — those below 80 proof like Tennessee Blackberry — contain more water by volume than traditional whiskey, meaning the distillery may already be using more water per barrel than it historically did.

And there is a deeper problem layered beneath the capacity question. The state will not permit MUD to expand its treatment plant while the utility’s water loss rate remains unresolved. As one board member put it: “They’re not going to give us a permit to build a new plant because we can’t find the water that’s leaking.”

WHAT HAPPENS IF THE NUMBER IS WRONG?

Here’s where Cameron Ray’s findings take on added weight. MUD’s water loss rate — currently reported to the state at roughly 41 percent — is calculated from the same data Ray reviewed. If the 150,000 to 300,000 gallon daily variance is a software and reporting error rather than physical water loss, that reported loss rate could be significantly overstated.

At the low end of Ray’s variance range, correcting the data error alone would reduce the reported loss rate by nearly 19 percentage points. At the high end, the swing is more than 37 points — enough to move MUD from a system in chronic crisis to one operating near acceptable levels.

That matters because it is the reported loss rate — not a corrected one — that currently informs state oversight, development moratoriums and the board’s own planning decisions. Nobody in the room on Tuesday night could say with certainty which scenario is true.

A wastewater inflow and infiltration study presented to the board on Tuesday by LJA Engineering noted that MUD’s rehabilitation work has produced measurable results — 107,000 gallons removed from the system in the first 24 hours after a two-inch storm. But they were equally direct about what remains unresolved: Woodard’s Pump Station, the second most critical asset in MUD’s own infrastructure plan, is currently leaking during rain events and has no backup system. If it fails, he said, the entire wastewater flow to the treatment plant stops.

The board took no action on the Jacobs Engineering referral. Ray’s recommendations — the reconciliation process, the software review, the Booneville Road follow-up — remain items on a list, not commitments.

Until the data question is resolved, Moore County is making decisions about its water future based on numbers that its own consultant says may not add up. •

About the Lynchburg Times: The Lynchburg Times is Moore County’s locally owned, independent news source and the only local media source own by a Lynchburg native. Our reporting is supported by readers, small business partners, and underwriters who believe community journalism matters. If this story was valuable to you, consider becoming a supporter at lynchburgtimes.com.