It’s a curiosity of living in Bathurst that one of the city’s greatest assets – its water – is also one of its biggest embarrassments.

The people of Bathurst are, quite rightly, extremely proud of the foresight of the former council that decided to raise the wall on Ben Chifley Dam.

While other cities suffered terribly during the decade-long dry spell at the beginning of the century, Bathurst – thanks also to Chifley Dam’s large catchment area – sailed through mostly unscathed.

During a period in which cities like Goulburn were getting down to the last muddy drops in their supplies, Bathurst’s water security was a tremendous asset in attracting – and keeping – new residents.

That is, until new residents had their first run-in with the city’s increasingly infamous dirty water.

Photos and stories have abounded in Bathurst in the past few years of ruined washing, stained bathtubs and filthy sinks – not the sort of publicity any city needs.

A current upgrade to the local water filtration plant, council says, is expected to be completed in the first half of this year.

Council hopes its $5 million Manganese Removal Project – the biggest upgrade to the filtration plant in more than 30 years – will end the city’s dirty water woes.

And what more appropriate time to do so than 200 years after Bathurst was proclaimed a settlement by Governor Lachlan Macquarie?

Those early settlers could never have imagined the ways in which Bathurst would grow and change: the highways, parks, streetlights, suburbs and race track. 

When imagining the future, however, it’s a fair bet they would have assumed the Bathurst of 2015 would be a city with access to fresh, clean water.

It’s time to make that assumption a reality.