The saga of brown water is hopefully nearing an end.

And plenty of people will be relieved when Well 9 is fixed by next summer, so that no more expensive blouses or Little League T-shirts are ruined when they’re washed, and Tremont Place residents won’t be bringing in any more bottled samples to add to Mark Dorsey’s collection.

Dorsey, the city engineer and public works director in Port Orchard, has spent a lot of time in his three-and-a-half years on the job dealing with dirty water complaints. But now he’s confident of a solution to the vexing problem with Well 9, the source of the discolored water that has flowed intermittently from residential faucets for several years.

And he’s long been certain that even when the water is discolored, it’s safe and poses no health hazard.

In fact, he once opened a bottle of brown water that Nicole Vaught brought from her home and drank some in front of her.

“It’s clean water,” Dorsey said in an interview Tuesday, but he’s never expected anyone to put up with such unpalatable water, even if it’s not a health risk.

To solve the problem, the city’s going to have to spend about $1 million to install a “distilling basin” at Well 9 to filter out hydrogen sulfide, and to send special devices called “pigs” through affected water lines to scour out a build-up of manganese, Dorsey said.

Vaught and her neighbors on Tremont Place, a one-block lane that’s been the epicenter of the water woes, said the problem didn’t just bubble up last year.

“No, it’s been a recurrent problem,” she said.

“The last couple years it escalated to the point where you have to check your water on almost a daily basis,” said Diane Huebert, one of her neighbors in the handful of houses near the intersection of Tremont Street and Pottery Avenue.

Huebert said some of her grandson’s baseball T-shirts were ruined by brown water when her daughter washed clothes at her house around the corner on Pottery.

The water problem also has affected a City Council member’s home on the other side of Tremont Street.

Councilman Jim Colebank said he and his wife first noticed the discolored water “three or four years ago,” when his wife had a $90 blouse ruined in the wash.

“The water was brown as heck,” Colebank said.

Whenever residents report brown water, city public works employees come out and check the flow from the main water line into the home. Residents are instructed to turn on faucets indoors and outside and to flush the discolored water out, which Huebert said could take 30 minutes to an hour.

Dorsey said water coming out of the well is not brown, and that his public works staff originally thought the discoloration was a system maintenance problem, which might be resolved by more frequent and forceful flushing of the water lines. But as problems were reported more frequently, the assessment changed.

“In 2010 the well was starting to be more than just a maintenance headache,” he said. “It became obvious there was a problem out there.”

Well 9 is the newest well in the system, brought online in the early 2000s, and Dorsey said city officials didn’t anticipate any repairs there to include in a capital facilities plan that was part of a larger, long-term water system plan the city began developing a few years ago.

As that water system plan — which required raising water rates to pay for it — was finalized last summer, Dorsey said he was able to add about $850,000 in the capital facilities portion to pay for fixing Well 9, even though the exact remedy had not yet been determined.

But the water system plan called for phasing in rate increases over six years, and under that schedule it would have taken several years to build up enough capital funding to pay for Well 9, Dorsey said.

When fixing Well 9 became an urgent need, “then the discussion became how do we fund this separate from the rate increase,” he said.

At Tuesday night’s meeting, the City Council approved paying for the Well 9 project out of the reserve fund for the city’s water and sewer systems. But since that will leave the reserve fund with only about $750,000 — a lot less than the preferred amount to keep in reserve to pay for water/sewer emergency repairs — the council decided to implement the water rate increases over a four-year period instead of five years, so the reserve fund can be replenished sooner.

Sooner is when folks who are tired of brown water hope the problem is fixed.

“It took too long, but now I’m satisfied that they’re going to do something,” Huebert said. “For a long time they just pooh-poohed the idea that there was anything wrong.”

Vaught, who has gotten well acquainted with Dorsey over the past couple years, expressed appreciation that he made it a priority to identify the source of the problem and find a solution.

“He’s not responsible for the problem, he’s trying to solve the problem,” she said.

Expressing a sentiment her neighbors likely share, she added, “I want to have water I can trust.”

Dorsey said the brown water problem that has vexed him and the residents around Tremont Place could have been prevented.

“It would have been a lot cheaper to install a distilling basin back when they did the original well,” he said.