When I woke up this morning, I felt a bit frantic… knowing that I had to write quickly.
The meeting of the Pagosa Springs Sanitation General Improvement District (PSSGID) board was scheduled for early this morning — 7am — and I wanted to attend, and see if anything interesting gets decided about the sewer pipeline IGA. That was going to seriously reduce the amount of time I had to finish writing this morning’s installment.
Or so I thought. Mistakenly.
The first part of the meeting is scheduled to be held behind closed doors, as an executive session, because the Town government is rather suddenly in a curious negotiating situation with their local partner in a joint $7 million (or $8 million?) waste water conveyance project — a seven-mile-long pressurized sewer line. I’m frankly not sure of the actual project cost at this point. It was supposed, in the very beginning, to cost around $4 million — to be paid jointly by PSSGID and the downtown sewer customers, and Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) and its sewer customers. But government projects often cost more than they are supposed to cost, for some unknown reason.
At any rate, the financing of the ambitious project, and the ultimate “cost per gallon” for processing PSSGID’s sewage at the PAWSD Vista treatment plant, were the primary subjects of an Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) constructed in closed door meetings back in 2011 and was approved in 2012 by the Town and PAWSD boards, without ever making the IGA document public.
Which is to say, it was a bad agreement from the very beginning. Poorly written, and badly approved. (Click here to download a copy of the IGA.)
But this bad agreement has been satisfactory for the purposes of spending maybe $7 million (or maybe $8 million) from the PAWSD and PSSGID bank accounts, and now the pressurized sewer line is nearly ready to begin delivering waste from downtown to the Vista treatment plant.
Start-up date was set for January 4, 2016.
But the PAWSD board of directors took action earlier this month to cancel the IGA, which they seemingly had every right to do. That cancellation has put the Town government in the position of needing to negotiate a new IGA — presumably, before they start pumping their sewage through the pipeline?
The need for such a new IGA will be the sole item on the PSSGID Board (Town Council) agenda to be handled partially behind closed doors in an executive session, perhaps…
II. PUBLIC COMMENT – Please sign in to make public comment
III. EXECUTIVE SESSION
1. Pursuant to C.R.S. Section 24-6-402(4)(b) Conference with an attorney for the public entity for the purpose of receiving legal advice on the possibility of initiating litigation in regards to the Sewer Pipeline Intergovernmental Agreement between the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) and the Pagosa Springs Sanitation General Improvement District (PSSGID)
IV. NEW BUSINESS
1. Resolution 2015-08, a resolution authorizing Andrew Nathan, Attorney at Law, to pursue available legal remedies to resolve the Pipeline IGA dispute on behalf of the PSSGID
None of the current PAWSD board members were party to the original IGA approval back in 2012, and during the past year, the new board has expressed its concerns that the IGA did not properly protect the interests of PAWSD customers. One of the issues of concern was the fact that the IGA created a multi-year debt situation between PAWSD and PSSGID which had never been approved by either the Town voters nor by the PAWSD customers.
Colorado law requires voter approval for the creation of multi-year government debt. Which might raise the question: Did the Town enter into an illegal IGA? And if so, what exactly are the obligations created for both PAWSD and PSSGID?
But that’s only one of a long list of concerns expressed by the PAWSD board.
At the December 10 PAWSD meeting, the board openly discussed their concerns about the IGA and the fact that they were having trouble coming to an agreement with the Town to re-open negotiations and fix some of the loose ends that existed in the 2012 IGA.
According to the agreement, the IGA may be terminated by failure “to appropriate moneys for the ensuing fiscal year to pay all amounts estimated to become due” under the IGA. The PAWSD board decided on December 10 to not appropriate those moneys.
PAWSD board member Glenn Walsh summarized the problem, from his point of view.
“We’re here today because of two agreements, now this agreement that was entered into in 2012 … Collins, Cockrel, Cole can sue me for slander; this is one of the most prominently miswritten agreements I’ve ever read for a large project. … This was an agreement basically to get a big project started.”
“People had a whole mix of motives that they wanted to get this project started, some commendable, some — as far as I am concerned — not that commendable,” added Walsh. “If you handed this to a freshman in FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America) and said, ‘Come up with an IGA between two municipal entities’ … this would get a ‘D’ from a freshman, that’s how bad this is. …
“We can’t go forward with this unless we come up with a good, solid professional operations agreement.”
PAWSD’s attorney Jeffrey P. Robbins wrote to Town manager Greg Schulte, in a letter dated December 1:
As you know, the crux of the issue is that the IGA contemplates the PAWSD Board and the PAWSD ratepayers subsidizing and paying certain of the incremental additional costs associated with the conveyance and treatment of PSSGID sewage at the PAWSD Vista treatment plant.
The letter states that the PAWSD board believes it is “fundamentally unfair for PAWSD ratepayers to subsidize, in perpetuity, the costs associated with treatment of PSSGID sewage.”
The PSSGID board, also known as the Town Council, doesn’t normally meet at 7am on a Monday morning.
And as I found out, after rushing out the door and driving through the fresh, powder snow to Town Hall… they were not meeting this morning after all. I had misread the emailed agenda. The meeting is scheduled for Tuesday morning at 7am.
Tomorrow, December 22.