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Daily Pagosa Springs News
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| USDA to the Rescue? |
| Bill Hudson | 3/5/10 |
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| Back to the News Summaries |
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One thing you can say about Phil Starks, the manager of the Town of Pagosa Springs sewer system.
He’s persistent.
That’s probably a good quality, for someone who is in charge of making sure our little town — 1,600 residents and 100 or so downtown businesses — doesn’t pollute the San Juan River.
Lately, we have been polluting the river. Just a little. That normally happens in the winter months, due to the Town’s aging lagoon-style sewer treatment plant; in cold weather, the bacteria that live in the lagoon and do the heavy work of breaking the raw sewage down into non-toxic materials, simply aren’t active enough to keep the sewer effluent from violating Colorado state standards. So we dump a little too much ammonia or solid waste into our local river — and we risk fines from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, CDPHE.
Fortunately for Pagosa Springs — and for the millions of people who live downstream of this little mountain town — Starks had some potentially good news to share at last Tuesday’s Town Council meeting.
”Good evening, Council. If I lose you at any point, please stop me and ask questions. I lose myself sometimes, so...
“Our sewer district was incorporated in 1959 and originally included 13 acres, using lagoons for primary treatment — lagoons with a large surface area, serving a small population...”
The Town started managing the district in 1993 and, due to numerous violations, was required by the state to improve its treatment capacity in 1997, by building new lagoons. That requirement was due more to changes in CDPHE water quality standards than to a growing population, as I understand it.
“The District at that time decided to go with the cheapest option,” Starks explained to the Council. “No one wanted to spend the $2.8 million necessary to build the oxidation ditch style treatment facility they’d been looking at.”
The Town was told by Davis Engineering that those lagoon improvements would buy the Town only about 8 years, due to constantly tightening CDPHE regulations. Nevertheless, the Town spent $1.2 million upgrading the lagoons, and is still paying off that loan. True to the engineers’ predictions, the lagoons began violating state standards a few years ago, and the Town began planning for a new mechanical treatment facility, estimated at about $5 million. The Town scrambled to assemble various loans to fund the expensive new sewer plant.
When the bids finally came in, the cost was closer to $6.5 million. The Town Council put the project on hold — much to Phil Starks’ dismay — and told Starks to dream up some way to keep the existing lagoons working.
Unfortunately Town’s existing system has another problem beside an inability to maintain legal ammonia levels: it has no more capacity. Four years ago, when the new mechanical treatment plant was in the early planning stages, it looked very likely that the Town of Pagosa Springs — whose population has remained fairly constant at about 1,600 residents for the past couple of decades — was going to be flooded with thousands of new residential homes and businesses as a result of several new subdivisions annexed by the Town. Projections, back then, showed the downtown population doubling in less than 20 years, at an impressive growth rate of 6 percent.
So the new sewer treatment plant design had been sized to accommodate double the amount of sewage the Town presently processes — with the ability to expand further as the need arose. The cost of building and operating this expanded sewer plant would be borne, in part, by all fees paid by those thousands of new families and businesses.
At least, so the Town hoped.
Last year, the Town issued exactly two building permits for new residential units. The average for the previous 5 years had been 45 units per year.
But the new sewer treatment plant still has to be built, someday — and the Town Council knows pretty clearly that it can’t easily afford the new plant without that once-expected influx of new homes and businesses.
Enter the USDA, and Mr. Duane Dale of the USDA’s Cortez office, back in June of last year. As Dale explained the federal funding process to the Council last summer, the main thing the Town needed that it didn’t have yet was a PER, a Preliminary Engineering Report. The Town has already done significant engineering work in developing its existing plans, but the PER would require a couple of additional things. The USDA would require the Town to discuss alternate locations and designs, and — the biggest hang-up — the USDA would require the Town to look at locating the sewer treatment plant outside the 500-year flood plain. That would require additional engineering to define the floodplain.
For various reasons, the Town Council declined Dale’s offer of funding assistance after last summer’s meeting. It appeared that the PER and related application and engineering costs would run about $100,000 — with no guarantee of USDA funding at the end of all those expenses.
But now things have changed at USDA, it appears.
“I was talking with Duane Dale yesterday, about a possible solar power project,” Starks told the Council last Tuesday, “and he mentioned that USDA has ARRA [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] funding for waste water treatment facilities — and here in the state of Colorado, they have $11 million available for loans and $5 million in grants.
“We are still facing the 500-year floodplain issue, but we have a few things in our favor at the moment. We didn’t get this sorted out until today, and we still don’t have it in writing from them, but it’s our understanding that the Colorado office can now approve projects here in Colorado. They don’t have to go to Washington DC for approval. So we can get USDA approval here in Colorado. That’s a huge bonus in our favor.”
Also, it appears that a FEMA approval of the floodplain outlines is no longer required. And USDA will now allow the Town to submit its application even before the floodplain engineering is completed.
”This may be our last chance to build something decent, that will actually benefit the Town, for now and for the long term. Anything else we do, we’ll be back to a stop-gap facility — and still be paying for that, when we finally have to look at a new facility. You’ve got to look at the new businesses who may come here. Will we have the capability to handle new waste — and new regulations?”
A mechanical treatment facility would last at least 20 years, Starks suggested, and would be easy to upgrade as needed.
Another apparent bonus is that the USDA engineer for the ARRA-funded projects is not the same one with whom Starks and Town manager David Mitchem were dealing last summer.
“The change of engineer is significant,” Mitchem told the Council. “The previous engineer was firm and adamant, and it wasn’t going to change. Now they are showing us flexibility.”
The Council asked a few questions — and expressed their concerns about spending more money on engineering and applications without any guarantee of success.
The final bonus perhaps, from Starks' point of view, was the resignation of Council member Mark Weiler at the very beginning of Tuesday's meeting — due to his change of residence. Weiler had been the Council member who'd pushed the hardest, over the past two years, to delay the new treatment facility until the state of Colorado — the folks with those high environmental standards — agreed to come up with the money to fund those standards, instead of piling the tax burden on local municipalities.
In the end, the Council authorized Starks to pursue the UDSA loans and grants.
Maybe we will get a real sewer plant, after all. |
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