MOUNT VERNON – Mathias Orndorf, Mount Vernon’s director of Public Utilities, is retiring in May after 31 years with the City.
“I’ve tried to do my best at this job and I’d like to move on,” Orndorf, a lifelong resident of Mount Vernon, told the Mount Vernon News.
At the top of his agenda is visiting his granddaughter, whom he has not seen since the COVID-19 pandemic hit. He also likes to hunt and fish.
Approximately 18 months ago, the City hired an assistant director to help Orndorf. The City has posted a job for another assistant director as well.
“Hopefully, that person will be hired before I leave, and I will get to train them,” Orndorf said.
The city will pick Orndorf’s successor from the two assistant directors, he noted.
Among the challenges facing the new director will be replacing aging water pipes. Some of the cast iron pipes are more than a century old.
“We can’t keep continuing to wait until they blow out,” Orndorf said. “We have a large, old cast-iron line going down West High Street. There are some more, but that’s the major one that would probably need to be looked at.”
Another project is a water tower on the south side of town.
“It would help with fire protection and storage,” Orndorf said. “If the power goes out and our generator doesn’t come on, which has happened a couple of times this year, then everybody past that pumping station loses pressure.
“(With a water tower) we would have storage; and even if the electric would go off and the generator wouldn’t start up, we would still have some capacity and we would have time to get out there and get things fixed before people lost pressure. It wouldn’t be an immediate boil advisory.”
The city is looking at an area south of town on Martinsburg Road for the new tower, Orndorf said.
A project that starts this year is the New Gambier Road Reservoir, which will increase the city’s water storage capacity.
Orndorf often hears complaints about Mount Vernon water bills.
“I really have a hard time believing that our rates are high after looking at the rates in places around us and also knowing the quality of water that we put out, ” he said.
The city took a hit in 2018 with the closing of the Siemens plant, a big industrial water customer.
“Their bills were between $80,000 and $100,00 a year,” Orndorf said. “We had to eat that loss of revenue.”
