Last spring when I was running for a seat on City Council, I attended a meeting of the city’s Utilities Commission. During that meeting, I heard the director of community development tell the chairman of the commission that it was not the Utilities Commission’s job to plan for the expansion or relocation of the wastewater treatment plant because this is the responsibility of the Planning Department.
So my question is: Why was there no foresight to envision moving the wastewater plant when the city’s comprehensive plan was updated in 2007 or even earlier? Didn’t anyone think the residents of Durango would want to see the plant moved out of Santa Rita Park? If the city had been proactive 10 years ago with slowly raising sewer rates, instead of the huge increases we are burdened with now, the city would have had the money to quietly acquire land to do the right thing that other communities such as Glenwood Springs have done and move the wastewater plant out of the center of our town.
Proponents of moving the plant are being portrayed as villains who are only going to make this project more expensive. It should be noted that proponents of moving the plant have gotten the city to admit that for the foreseeable future it does not need the 4 million gallons per day (MGPD) plant capacity that has been used for cost estimating this project. The city has agreed that a 3.25 MGPD plant will be adequate. This is a huge savings for the residents of Durango but no cost estimates have ever been updated for this smaller plant size.
At the Oct. 5 Utilities Commission meeting, I requested that the city be honest and transparent by revising the cost estimates to reflect the smaller plant size but apparently it is unwilling to do so. Instead, city officials included these inflated numbers in the City Council resolution and in this week’s Chamber of Commerce presentation of the ballot issue.
The city is asking us to approve a $68 million bond issue for a 4 MGPD plant that already has a $12 million (25 percent) contingency built into the cost estimate, with another $10 million for other wastewater projects. A reasonable estimate for a 3.25 MGPD plant is in the neighborhood of $48 million to $50 million leaving a staggering $18 to $20 million for other unspecified projects. So it appears that the wastewater treatment plant could indeed be moved for the proposed $68 million bond issue.
Concerned residents have expressed many creative ideas that could help make moving the plant a reality. One idea is that some of the $5 million raised every year with the ½ cent sales tax for recreation could be used for the demolition of the existing plant. This was dismissed without any serious discussion at all. And in the cost estimates for moving the plant credit is never given for the additional park land in Santa Rita Park, which should have been included in any fair analysis of alternative sites.
The city touts that the new plant will be attractive and odor-free and therefore a good neighbor to Santa Rita Park. But when the same argument is used for moving the plant to Cundiff Park, for example, it falls on deaf ears.
So now the city is in crisis mode and supposedly there’s nothing else it can do because the discharge permit expires in 2018. The truth is that while the existing discharge permit does expire in 2018, the city has until 2023 to comply with the new regulations that are driving the need for a new plant. All that is necessary is for the city to negotiate a compliance schedule with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to gain this extra five years of time to construct the plant – hardly an insurmountable task.
We are being threatened that the city will have to raise sewer rates to $158 per month, the city won’t be able to issue building permits, and no way will the city revisit this issue even if the bond is voted down. This is nonsense. All the city has to do is come back with the project in a location that is acceptable to its constituents and put the bond back to voter approval in November 2016. These scare tactics do not seem to be a reasonable and civil way to have a rational discussion about what will be the largest capital construction project in Durango history.
Yes, it will be more work for city staff to accomplish moving the wastewater treatment plant, but we believe this can be done within the $68 million proposed for the bond issue. Voting “no” on 2B will allow the city another year to get its act together and accomplish what will be in the best long-term interest of the community.
Please join us in voting “no” on 2B as a message to the city that the residents they serve want to see the wastewater treatment plant moved out of Santa Rita Park.
Dave McHenry is a resident of Durango and the landscape architect who drew the original design for Santa Rita Park. Reach him at NO2BDurango@gmail.com.
