Robbins got good and bad news this week from a water plant report. Bill Lester, of Hobbs & Upchurch, told a 2 p.m. Monday called meeting of the town board that company engineers looked at three water source options.

Unfortunately, all three would mean an increase in water rates. That was the bad news.

Some of the good news was that a brand-new, state-of-the-art plant would cost little more than the investment required to bring the town’s 70-some-year-old plant back on line. Even better news was unexpected information that Asheboro has water aplenty and will sell it cheaply, very cheaply.

State certification of the old Robbins plant has lapsed, and the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) would consider its refurbishment new construction. It would have to meet the same standards, Lester said.

The special meeting began with commissioners amending the agenda to add a possible closed session so commissioners could discuss the town’s bargaining position in any contract negotiations with potential bulk water purchasers. The most obvious such buyer – almost visibly standing in the wings – is the county, which is looking for a way to get water to the Seven Lakes area of Moore County.

Lester laid out three basic options. The first is staying with the current plan and continuing to buy water from Montgomery County. The contract requires a minimum purchase of 125,000 gallons a day at $3.07 per thousand gallons up to a maximum of 145,000 gallons/day. Above that, the rate doubles to $6.14 per 1,000 gallons.

Town Manager George Hayfield told the board he’d been negotiating with Montgomery, and was able to get that ceiling raised to 195,000 gallons before double rates kick in.

Even with that concession, water rates would have to rise by 10 to 15 percent if Robbins stays with the Montgomery County option, Lester said. The second option he looked at was restarting the existing plant. It would cost $3.2 million to upgrade the old plant, of which $2.5 million would be construction costs. There would be additional costs from D.E.N.R.’s treating a restart as “a new withdrawal” according to Lester.

The third option, possibly the one most attractive to commissioners at first glance, would be building a new water treatment plant. Lester described a modern system combining pre-treatment with a micro-pore filtration system similar to what Carthage uses. That would cost only a little more than the old plant upgrade, around $3.4 million.

“Equipment is not quite half, but it is a large part of that cost,” Lester said. “This plant would start with a 500,000 gallons/day capacity. Expandability would be cheaper.”

Either the upgrade or the new plant option, at present water usage, would mean rates going up by 38 to 39 percent, the report projects. However, there was a brighter side to the picture with a bulk water purchaser. All those numbers were based on Robbins using 200,000 gallons/day with no bulk water customer.

“If you use 450,000 gallons, you dramatically change what happens,” Lester said. “At that, you drop below the increase in the Montgomery County option.”

Instead of rates going up between 10 and 15 percent, he said they’d have to rise only by a third to half that much: five to 10 percent instead of 10 to 15.

At this point, Commissioner Lynn Loy moved the board go into closed session to talk about instructions to the town’s negotiators who will be talking deals to potential bulk purchasers and staking out positions to use negotiating any new plant construction contracts.

Robbins would seek combined grant/loan financing from the United States Department of Agriculture like the one U.S.D.A. offered last week for the town’s first fire station. The U.S.D.A. will not consider such financing without a bulk water purchase contract, the board was told.

The very best news of all may well have emerged during an ad hoc meeting last week with people from Asheboro and nearby counties and communities. Hayfield attended that Friday morning session.

“Asheboro has more water to sell than anybody,” Hayfield said in an interview while the board was meeting in its closed session. “They have probably six million gallons a day they can sell at 88 cents per 1,000 gallons. Even at double that, the price (of Asheboro water) is way below the $3.07 to $6.14 per 1,000 gallons under our new contract with Montgomery County. All it would take is a pipeline.”

He estimated that pipe’s cost at around $400,000 for three miles in Moore County and three more across the line in Randolph County. Instead of the water flowing up from Robbins toward Westmoore, it would flow in the opposite direction toward Robbins.

“We did a lot of brainstorming at that Friday session,” he said. “Allen Hart from USDA was there. So were County Manager Cary McSwain and Dennis Brobst from Moore County. With Asheboro water, we would not have to worry about inter-basin transfer. We are both in the Cape Fear River Basin.

Environmental rules limit the amount of wastewater than can cross over from one basin to another.

Commissioners emerged from their closed personnel session and took only two actions. They called a special meeting for 6 p.m., Oct. 5, to consider the town manager’s performance. The board previously had said it would review Hayfield’s performance twice a year. Commissioners set certain goals that they termed “KPI” or “key performance indicators” for his work, so he would know what they expected from him. They will evaluate his KPIs at that Oct. 5 session.