The first mention of failing sewage pumps, at last night’s October 5 Pagosa Springs Town Council meeting, occurred during the Council’s interview of three candidates for a vacant seat on the Council, at the very beginning of the meeting.
Council member Rory Burnett had resigned his post a couple of months ago, and the normal process at Town Hall is for the surviving Council members to elect a replacement, to fill the vacancy for the remainder of the departed member’s term.
At the conclusion of the interviews last night, the Council voted unanimously to appoint current Town Planning Commission member Jeff Posey to fill the vacancy for the next 30 months. Mr. Posey was duly sworn in by Town Clerk April Hessman and took his seat on the dais, and proceeded to vote on the various matters on the agenda.
But the reference to failing sewage pumps, during the interview process, had been made by another of the candidates: Gary Williams. According to his application for the position, Mr. Williams has his Ph.D. in “Environmental, Natural Resource, and Rural Sociology” — fields of study that would seem applicable to making legislation in a town like Pagosa Springs.
Mr. Williams was asked, “What are the most important issues facing the Town, to be addressed by the Council, over the next one to three years?”
I admit to being somewhat surprised by Mr. Williams’ answer, because it’s my own opinion that the housing crisis is far and away the most pressing problem facing Archuleta County, now and in the coming years.
But Mr. Williams didn’t mention housing. He spoke, instead, about wildfire. And, incidentally, about sewage.
“Well, I’ve been studying climate change since 1990, and reading about it, and keeping up with it. And I think there’s some risk to the town…
“You might ask yourselves, if we have a big forest fire — and I know this is outside your regular range of things — but if we had a big forest fire, and the transmission lines to the town burned, and you don’t have power, for 30 days or something…
“How are you going to manage that?
“I mean, you can’t pump waste up the hill… you know, some people can’t get water… and so on and so forth. And you can kind of see what happens, if you look at California.
“And I know, that could be in twenty years. Or it could be in three years. But we do know the intensity of ‘fire weather’ as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls it…
“So that would be one thing I think you should start working on, pretty soon…”
Mr. Williams’ reference, here, to “pumping waste uphill” relates to a curious situation that the Town of Pagosa Springs has got itself into.
In most communities, sewage waste flows downhill to a treatment plant. Generally speaking.
No small, rural town in its right mind would, for example, design a sewage system that has to pump maybe 750,000 daily gallons of sewage uphill to a sewage treatment plant located seven miles away. Especially, no small, rural town would design a system that depended upon electric pumps… powered by La Plata Electric Association transmission lines that run through 60 miles of dense forest just waiting to catch fire, sometime in the next 3 to 20 years.
That would be crazy.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what the Town of Pagosa Springs has done, through its Pagosa Springs Sanitation General Improvement District (PSSGID).
Instead of building its own gravity-fed, state-of-the-art sewage treatment plant at the south end of town, as was planned for many years, the Town Council was suckered — is that the right word? — was suckered into borrowing millions of dollars and building a seven-mile sewage pipeline from its southern boundary to the Vista Waste Water Treatment Plant operated by the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD).
You can read more about the suckering process in this Daily Post article from 2015.
The decision to pump sewage uphill has proved enormously expensive, as well as being a constant headache for the Town Public Works staff.
We heard more about those continual headaches during the PSSGID board meeting last night. (The Town Council also serves as the PSSGID Board of Directors.) The meeting agenda packet included the minutes from the June 17 PSSGID board meeting:
Pump Station Solution Bid Award
RG & Associates proposed solutions for the pump failures, staff recommends Pentair-Fairbanks for $585,600 to replace the pumps. Staff is requesting a 3% contingency of $17,568 on top of the bid award to absorb any additional small costs. Board Member Pierce asked about the warranties offered with these pumps and the time-frame of the project. Public Works Director Schmidt, said the pumps are estimated to have a 15-year life span and the project will take twenty to forty weeks. Town Manager Phillips said the grant will cover $400,000 of the anticipated cost of $700,000. She said by utilizing the American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds, could make up the $300,000 still needed. The Town is estimating to receive $524,000 in ARP funding in 2021-2022 and this project is an allowable use of the ARP monies.
Board Member Matt DeGuise moved to award the contract to Pentair-Fairbanks for $585,600, and a 3% District contingency of $17,568, and authorize the Town Manager to sign, Board Member Mat deGraaf seconded; Carried.
The $400,000 grant, mentioned here, was awarded by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE), the state agency charged with making sure communities properly treat their wastewater (among its other duties, as we know.)
The pumps to be replaced at a cost of $585,000 are electrically-powered pumps made by Sulzer, “one of the world’s leading pump manufacturers”, which have been breaking down on a regular basis over the past few months.
In fact, it would appear that all of pumps made by Sulzer, used in the sewer pipeline, had failed by the time of last night’s meeting.
The Sulzer pumps had replaced an earlier set of pumps that had also failed.
And we currently have no backup pumps available?
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.