The alarm bells that went off in Granville after the City of New Albany applied for a permit to drill a test water well in Granville Township have quieted in the 18 months since then.
Granville draws its drinking water from wells in the same aquifer, and the thought of millions of gallons of water being extracted from it daily for other purposes – including the possibility of supplying water to Intel for use in its computer-chip manufacturing process – raised many concerns in Granville.
Now, after months of meetings to get to know each other better and talk about the proposed test well, leaders from the two communities are working together toward conducting the test, and filing with Licking County for a permit as soon as August.
Some preliminary work was done at the site just west of Granville in the past month – visible from the T.J. Evans Pathway – that prompted some area residents to ask about what is happening.
“A lot has changed in 18 months,” said Granville Village Manager Herb Koehler. “We had a lot of concerns and questions early on. There was a lot of uncertainty.”
That came after Dan VanNess, a Granville-area farmer and Granville Township trustee, sold about 106 acres to The New Albany Company and the City of New Albany filed with the Licking County Planning Department for a permit to drill a test well. And that happened because the City of New Albany had been given a $1.3 million grant from the state to do a search for water that could be used by Intel.
As part of its incentive package to get Intel to build what it said in January 2022 would be the world’s largest computer-chip manufacturing campus, the State of Ohio and New Albany said they would find potential water sources. Since that announcement in 2022, the City of Columbus has said it can serve Intel’s water needs.
All of this caught Granville village officials by surprise and they reacted with some pretty strong criticism – in part because they felt blindsided by a neighbor, Koehler said.
“To the credit of New Albany and The New Albany Company, they decided to take a knee and regroup,” he said. “We met with the City of New Albany a number of times and have gotten to know them, and they have gotten to know us and our wants and needs.”
| Read more: New Albany withdraws request for water well testing permit in Licking County after Granville officials raise concerns
When New Albany officials realized how upset Granville officials were, Koehler said, “we were pretty quick to get a call together. That first call was pretty frictional, but it became very clear that knowing your brothers and sisters in neighboring communities is important, and we just didn’t have a relationship.”
They warmed to each other pretty quickly, he said.
“It’s much better finding solutions to your problems than fighting with each other, because you still have to find solutions,” Koehler said. “I think they all understand that our concerns haven’t disappeared. They know it’s still a very important and precious resource for us.”
Jennifer Chrysler, community development director for the City of New Albany, said that productive conversations with neighbors are “definitely the direction we want to be going in.”
In general, she said, “We think we have a lot in common with Granville – a planned community knowing what we want to be and not be.”
The ongoing meetings have “helped bring us in western Licking County together to talk about growth and issues beyond water,” Chrysler said.
She said discussions in the past nine months have involved engineers and others with technical expertise to “really make sure the scope is reflective of all of the information we need.”
The next step is working with the Licking County Planning Commission on the permit process to drill the test well.
“I don’t think there is any end goal about a use for the water at this point,” Chrysler said. “We just want to have information and details.”
Koehler said a meeting is scheduled for the week of July 7 with key stakeholders who would be involved with a test well – the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the county planning department and county engineer, Granville village and township, Licking County Soil & Water Conservation District, the City of New Albany and The New Albany Company, and engineers who would direct the test and analyze the results.
The goal is to have a common understanding about the test ahead of filing for a permit. The proposed test site is in a floodplain along Raccoon Creek, and a permit is required to do that kind of work in a floodplain.
The work some people saw from the bike path recently is actually two separate projects. One, just south of the bike path and immediately west of Wildwood Park, is unrelated to the well test. It is a project to install drainage tile on village-owned land where former farm drainage tiles failed and created some sinkholes.
The other work, a little farther west, was the drilling of up to 10 monitoring wells with two-inch pipes “that will help us understand what’s going on in the area,” especially when the test well is ready,” Koehler said.
“The test well is larger – 24 inches – and we would pump that well over a three-day period to see what kind of volumes will come out of that well,” he said. “New Albany and The New Albany Company have said they are looking only at what can be responsibly removed.”
The benefits of working together on the test, Koehler said, is that Granville is involved in the conversations about how the testing will be done, and it will receive data from the test in real time.
“We’re still operating off of studies done in the 1990s and in a limited scope,” he said about Granville’s knowledge of the aquifer, which supplies about 1 million gallons of water a day for customers in Granville and Alexandria. “We’ll know a lot more about that aquifer because of this test.”
That Columbus has indicated it can serve Intel’s water needs takes some pressure off of the Granville Township site, Koehler said, but village and township officials will be interested in any future water operation going in there.
“Given its proximity to the village, my hope is that we could partner with them on that site someday,” he said. “In the meantime, we will build a relationship with them that will have more transparency all the way around.”
Alan Miller writes for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported by generous donations from readers. Sign up for The Reporting Project newsletter here.