Even though the City of Truth or Consequences, under new City Manager Gary Whitehead, is becoming more transparent and communicative, it was not in time to inform and stir public engagement in the annual Infrastructure Capital Improvements Plan.
The ICIP is a five-year plan that is updated every year. It’s the only planning activity the city commission engages in, and only in a desultory way, which explains why the water and wastewater and electric systems have been allowed to decay to the point that millions in emergency repairs have had to be done over the past five years.
Funding for “critical” water infrastructure repairs is in hand ($50 million) and four projects will be done over the next four years that will stop the horrifying waste of our precious water–up to 70 percent some months and down to 42 percent over the last three months, according to new Water and Wastewater Supervisor Jamie Foreman, who reported during the June 11 meeting.
The funding for critical water system repairs is thanks to the legislature, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, Sen. Crystal Brantley, Rep. Gail Armstrong, Rep. Tara Jaramillo (whom the people voted out and put in Rebecca Dow) and U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich and state agencies, such as the New Mexico Environment Department and New Mexico Finance Authority.
The ICIP is the document that every legislator and state agency uses to decide what projects to fund, which is first turned into the New Mexico Department of Finance and Administration. The DFA is the collector and organizer and monitor of the ICIP information, which is turned in by every governmental entity in the state.They assume the projects listed by the government entity have the community’s endorsement, that they are not paying for public projects unwillingly.
But T or C’s public input has been a “check the box” process. If throughout the year the city hasn’t reported or revealed needs and problems, the public won’t know enough to rank or name priority projects.
The city commission, at its June 11 meeting, decried that only four people showed up to four public meetings on the ICIP–two on May 8 and two on May 22. City Commissioner Ingo Hoeppner claimed that people had “no excuse” for not participating. But people have better things to do than attend meetings that are just for show.
For the last six years I have reported on the results of these public-input ICIP meetings. Four people showing up is better than some years, but probably about average. Each of those years the people have said they want a covered swimming pool or a rec center with a covered pool in it and they want the roads fixed. Bad roads are what they see, what they drive on every day. And the people have long desired a covered pool–at least for the 20 years I’ve lived here.
But what if they knew 70 percent of the water being pumped is leaking? Or that one of the two electric transformers had gone down and both were over 60 years old and long past their life cycle? Or that only two out of six wells were working and the water tanks were so low that the schools and hospitals might go dry? That actually happened, due to lack of planning and the city commission willfully choosing to remain ignorant and uninformed.
This is what I call toxic hunkydoryism–the suppression of reporting and fact finding with public meetings taken up with staff attendance awards and city commissioner “reports” on community events. Doing the hard work of gathering evidence and facts and keeping daily records and evaluating and critically thinking about the city’s infrastructure has not been demanded by or done by the city commission.
City Manager Jaime Aguilera (2005 to 2009) knew the state of the city’s infrastructure and what needed to be done and demanded that city department heads report regularly. Lord help them if they wanted to make an emergency or critical purchase they had not budgeted for or foreseen. Aguilera drove the ICIP process through engineering studies. He would explain to the city commission why a study or preliminary engineering report was needed, and those projects would go on the ICIP list. Without a PER, a project is not taken seriously.
Until Whitehead was hired as city manager a few months ago, the city commission, in the intervening 16 years, has been rudderless and willfully ignorant, unless an emergency forced them to focus.
We don’t know what the four people who went to the public-input meetings said in particular this year. The coordinator, Yvette Bayless of South Central Council of Governments, flashed a pie chart on a screen at the June 11 meeting that turned their remarks into mush—useless broad categories. “Infrastructure” was a top priority, followed by “recreation,” “environment,” “public safety” and “housing and economic.” No wonder one of the participants said they didn’t feel “heard” by the city.
Whitehead is making city department heads report and he’s in the process of putting future and current city projects on the city website–with maps and explanations and details, so next year the ICIP process will not be performative, will not be check-the-box.
At the June 11 meeting Whitehead was successful in convincing the city commission to hone and pare down their ICIP document to elevator-speech length-–five projects instead of dozens and dozens. If it’s not in the top five, he said, the DFA, legislators and state officials have made it clear that it won’t be looked at, it won’t be funded.
The city commission, which also thinks in broad and vague categories, decided, as voiced by Mayor Pro Tem Amanda Forrister, that “infrastructure, quality of life and tourism” should be the focus of ICIP projects.
Their number one ICIP project is “water and wastewater.” Whitehead spoke with the Citizen after the meeting and provided more substance and definition. First off, since water projects over the next four years are funded and planned, under this rubric will only be wastewater projects.
Whitehead’s goal is to fix some severe problems that will get the wastewater department through the next five years, during which time a system-wide study will be done that will be used as a blueprint for future capital project needs. The city just got the $191,000 requested to do that study, he said.
Projects that will be under the “water and wastewater” rubric will likely include a solution to the bombshell Water and Wastewater Supervisor Jamie Foreman reported at the June 11 meeting. She recently learned that the “clay beds,” where the solids left at the end of treatment are spread and dried, are deemed too close to the river by NMED. They want the city to shut the beds down now, Whitehead said. Foreman said the NMED had told the city to move the beds some time ago. Another emergency caused by no reporting.
At the prior city commission meeting Whitehead reported that the city is under an NMED “order” to fix the headworks so the workers do not have to crawl into a hole filled with methane gas to remove big debris. This manual stop-gap work has been going on since July 2020, when the headworks were broken during a one-hour, five-inch rain event. This project also must get done soon and will be under the “water and wastewater” rubric.
And then there is the vacuum sewer system on riverside, stupidly installed instead of the traditional lift and pumping station in the 1990s–a system meant for a yacht yard, for boats to pump out their potty bilges. The company that made the parts doesn’t make them any more and is charging an arm and a leg for non-standardized parts replacements. The pump and vacuum have broken down repeatedly, although Whitehead said the pump side of the system was recently fixed.
Another project under this rubric will be repair of the sewer lift station on Coleman street.
Whitehead said there is no projected cost estimate for the “water and wastewater” rubric yet, but June 26 the final ICIP document will be presented to the city commission for approval.
City commissioners chose fixing the Lee Belle Johnson Community Center as the second ICIP project.
The building’s floor heaved up five years ago due to hot springs water decaying its foundations. It will cost about $2 million to fix it, Whitehead said.
Mayor Rolf Hechler asked City Commissioner Merry Jo Fahl, who pushed to make this project a priority, what she intends the building to be used for. Fahl had no clear answer. The building has been used for several years as the spaceport visitor’s center and the Geronimo Trail Scenic Byway visitor’s center. For the last three years or so the city has rented a space for $25,000 a year at 523 N. Broadway. Hechler said using the building as a music venue would be good.
The city commissioners’ third priority project is “Marie Street.” Whitehead said this is a major collector of side-street traffic that feeds vehicles onto the main artery, N. Date Street. It runs over a dirt dam on the golf course grounds, which needs work, and the water and sewer lines need to be torn up and replaced. The road needs to be repaved with new gutter and sidewalk. No figure estimate yet.
City commissioners picked “transformer” as the fourth project. The second 60-year-old transformer will be refurbished and a third transformer will be installed to add stability and redundancy to the electric system. It will cost about $2 million, Whitehead said.
The fifth pick by city commissioners was “rec center.” Hechler said that as a member of the hospital’s Joint Powers Commission he has learned that the hospital wants to build a health center that will include an indoor pool and the city should reach out to the hospital. No figure for what this might cost. Whitehead said he’s long thought that the city’s golf course property would be a good location for a rec center.
I got the feeling that some of our commissioners would like more input from the community but only on certain issues. That’s human nature I suppose, only wanting input for more manageable and less controversial issues. But of course in that case things may appear to run smoothly while there are a ton of problems right below the surface. that just get ignored or passed on to the next group of elected officials. That’s how I see it anyway.