Members of Hope Water & Light management and its board stand in front of the smorgasbord table at this morning's Hope-Hempstead County Chamber of Commerce Community Coffee held at the utility's headquarters.

This morning’s Hope-Hempstead County Chamber of Commerce Community Coffee was held on the second floor of Hope Water & Light’s headquarters on 105 North Elm in part to celebrate National Water Week, which ends Saturday.

Catered by Sheba’s, the event lived up to the sumptuous examples of past HW&L Community Coffees with a spread that included smoked honey ham, boiled shrimp, breakfast rolls, cheeseburger dip with tortilla chips, white melba toast, chicken salad croissants, barbecue chicken nuggets, fruit and vegetable plates, coffee cake, brownies and punch.

Asked what recent developments had come about at HW&L, Russell Cornelius, General Manager for Operations of the Water Department, said “We’re rolling out our broadband project, which is 98 percent complete with the mainline fiber. We are actually running drops to houses right now and within three weeks we’ll be lighting customers up, providing broadband.”

Cornelius also mentioned an upgrade on the electrical side. “We continue to add smart switches to the distribution system, so we can minimize the number of customers who experience an outage when we have storms.”

An improvement a bit further in the past, meanwhile, has addressed the quality of the drinking water. “A year or two ago,” Cornelius said, “we did a major water project at our water treatment plant in Fulton. We actually built two more finished water reservoirs with both aeration and mixing in them that will help reduce disinfection byproducts just to improve the overall quality of the water.”