For the last seven years the city commission has fixed its bleary focus on the city’s ailing water system and ignored red flags at the wastewater treatment plant.
It takes a lot to get the city commission to focus. For the water system It took years of above-ground massive water leaks
I checked a few months ago on the leakage rate–47 percent of produced and treated water–which is highest during summer months. A few summers ago, city records showed nearly 70 percent of produce and treated water was leaking.
What waste! Not just the environmental sin of wasting water. Also wasting our hard-earned dollars. We pay to pump and treat and transmit that water. And we are paying for temporary patches for pipes that will eventually be replaced. We are paying for long term fixes too.
The cause? Our elected officials didn’t do their jobs, and they still aren’t, but we lucked out when they finally hired a very good city manager, Gary Whitehead.
Just as it took water running in the streets to get the city commissioners to focus on the water system, it took the Environmental Protection Agency and the New Mexico Environment Department issuing Administrative Orders to fix the city’s wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) to get their attention. See: https://sierracountycitizen.org/truth-about-the-wwtp-crisis-and-solution/
But, as usual, the city commissioners did not communicate this dire circumstance to the public. If they had, it would expose their continuing neglect and incompetence. They put their rep and image above your right to know.
They also risked the public purse. The EPA issues an administrative order as legal prelude to levying fines. Under the Clean Water Act, EPA daily fines for a city violating its National Pollutant Discharge Elimination Permit (NPDES) is up to nearly $70,000 a day for civil actions. Criminal violations, such as negligence, are $2,500 to $50,000 a day. “Knowing violations,” which are also criminal, are $5,000 to $100,000 per day. Per day.
We only learned about the Administrative Orders a few months ago, when Whitehead, during a city meeting, referred to the city commissioners’ verbal instruction to address the Administrative Order upon being hired.
Whitehead got those AOs lifted by forthrightly communicating with the EPA and NMED after learning everything he could about the system. He split off wastewater from on-call engineering firm Wilson and Company and gave it to Bohannan Huston after careful vetting. He rejiggered staff and hired an outside firm with required level 3 licensing. He got the city commission to approve grant/loan applications and lobbied legislators and attended state agency meetings, speaking with experts reviewing those applications.
He obviously impressed them with his honesty, hard-earned knowledge, dedication to monitoring and fixing the problems, and ability to communicate with and gather staff and engineers to plan and execute solutions.
In a year and a half, Whitehead made his goal of gathering the $4 million he estimated was needed to fix the plant, which is $1 million less than the engineers’ estimate.
The last piece was a grant/loan/cash match from the New Mexico Finance Authority’s Water Trust Board: $2.27 grant, $252,000 loan, $252,000 cash match in round terms, totalling $2.775 million.
This is in addition to the nearly $400,000 grant loan from NMFA’s Colonias Infrastructure Fund that will fix the “headworks.” Headworks remove the solids, large grit and debris at the entrance of the plant.
Whitehead convinced the NMED that a whole new redesign of the headworks was not necessary, just a replacement. The 2017 design was not the problem, he argued, it was the storm. This saved the people a lot of money.
Staff have been forced to deal with the headworks problem manually since July 2020, when a massive rain damaged them, going down into the headworks’ pit to clear debris. Some staff were overcome by methane, revealed, not by the city, but by a letter-to-the-editor by one of the worker’s family members. OSHA violations, also not made public, forced the city to provide masks and other safety equipment about three years ago.
Of course the NMED and EPA have been aware of the headworks problem since 2020, waiting four years or so before issuing administrative orders to jolt the city into action. But the city commission should have reacted and come clean in 2020. I don’t know if the workers were angered enough by the lack of action and neglect to sue the city, but they certainly had a case.
But back to the $4 million in funding needed to fix the WWTP and get back into good graces with the EPA and NMED.
Besides the $2.7 million grant/loan/cash match and the $400,000 for the headworks, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham gave the city $1 million last legislative session for the WWTP, which brings the funding available to nearly $4.2 million.
Work to be done, In addition to the headworks, include replacement of the “weirs” in both “clarifiers.” A clarifier “is a large settling tank that uses gravity to separate suspended solids and floating materials from water,” according to Google AI. Weirs “regulate the water level and ensure the treated effluent exits the tank in a smooth, even and controlled sheet.”
Whitehead said the NMED insisted on a newly-stamped engineering plan/design for the weirs, which were also a 2017 installation. Cheaper fiberglass weirs were purchased and haven’t performed. They will be replaced with custom-made stainless steel weirs, Whitehead said.
Work to be done also includes removal of the old clarifiers, which should have been done during the 2017 WWTP upgrade, a negligence that must be corrected.
The old concrete “drying beds” weren’t removed either. The beds are used to spread out and dry the sludge, an end product of processing. Whitehead said the city will mix it with mulch and sell it.
The old drying beds were at the back of the plant property, nearer the river, but in 2017 the city put in new ones near the front. Whitehead said new concrete will be poured over the old drying beds, a better location to mitigate the smell.
After this work is done on the WWTP, Whitehead estimates it should stem the need for expensive repairs to the plant for five years.
Whitehead’s careful oversight and negotiations with state and federal officials has averted big sewer rate hikes. In recent meetings Whitehead has said sewer-rate increases will probably remain at 5 percent a year.
That is a lot of good government and turnaround accomplished by Whitehead in a year and a half.