It is a question which has occurred to many people who worry about the public infrastructure of Archuleta County: Why should the water system running beneath the declining County road system be any better than those roads?
There are of course solid reasons to suspect the fluid system is better. Water and wastewater are subject to a battery of federal and state standards, constantly. Standards which the district generally not only meets but exceeds. And the financial health of PAWSD, apart from a 2002-deep drought in reservoir funds, is surer than that of the County or Town today.
Nothing comparable to the two-year swipes from the Road Capital Improvement Fund has occurred at PAWSD. Indeed, apart from the controversial handling of the Dry Gulch project, the board wins high marks for attempting to reinvest in a water distribution system which was neglected for years. The board also receives public criticism for hikes in fees and rates, which might indicate why that reinvestment was neglected for years.
This article is an investigative report. To PAWSD’s credit, the investigation was undertaken not by me, but by the water district itself. There are striking graphics and painstaking tables of water usage and loss. They were compiled by PAWSD and incorporated into its Water Conservation Plan now available online for customers to review. Continued...
PAWSD has documented a dramatic decline in water use by its average user during this decade of nearly 25%; and total system use has barely increased over the past ten years |
There is very good news in this report. PAWSD measures an incredible decline of 25% in water use by its average customer since 2000 — before adoption of this Conservation Plan, which anticipates another 10% decline over ten years. In fact, total usage of potable water by the entire district, not on a per tap basis but total usage, is essentially unchanged since 1998. The rationale for a 35,000 acre-foot reservoir at Dry Gulch is obviously not buoyed by a report that the last ten years of population, residential and commercial growth has been serviced completely by the same amount of water.
Is it worth the time of customers to review this plan? Well, consider this figure: $20,000 per acre foot. That is the price the Conservation Plan assesses potential water saving devices and policies against. That $20,000/AF figure makes for a potential financial tsunami. A 12,500 acre foot reservoir project would cost $250 million; a 35,000 AF Project would approach $700 million.
Those millions would make an eye-catching, but unfair, headline this week. However, the Conservation Plan assesses the savings that can be made over the next ten years, and $20,000 per acre foot is a frighteningly possible figure at the midpoint of that period, in 2013 or 2014. The likely price in 2009 is scary enough, close to $10,000, making a 12,500 AF project almost as expensive as the 35,000 AF project was estimated to cost in 2006.
Consider a second eye-catching figure that we do need to make headline news: 34%. That is how much treated potable water the water district is losing between its treatment plants and our homes. This is a remarkably high figure, if not quite third-worldish. The industry standard is 10% loss of treated water, and 15% is regarded as acceptable. The Republic of Germany loses only 7% of its treated water, after inheriting the East German water systems. Continued...
Non-revenue or "loss" treated water totals over 34% of all water treated, over 70% of total residential use, and over 250% of total commercial water use. |
PAWSD treated approximately 1900 acre feet of water in 2007. It lost almost 670 acre-feet of that water. Applying the $20,000 per acre foot yardstick of the Conservation Plan, results in costs of over $13,000,000. Applying the more reasonable (given the present insanity of the Producer Price Index) figure of $10,000 per acre foot, results in costs of over $6.5 million to build a reservoir project to supply that lost 670 acre-feet.
And while the district cannot ascertain where this 34% loss went in 2007, one can report where it has gone for the next 100 years: into the district’s forecast for future demand. This is the subject of Part Two of the article, where the engineering exactness and political candor of the first three sections of the Conservation Plan give way to the clear influence of Fred Schmidt’s flim-flam salesmanship of a 35,000 acre foot reservoir.
That 35,000 AF reservoir, given these new numbers of water usage (about 230 gallons per day per home within ten years), would supply 135,000 homes. This figure assumes that we will still lose 34% of our water in the future, which is highly unlikely. It is left to the reader’s imagination to find room on the small fraction of private land in Archuleta County for 135,000 homes, hotel rooms and restaurants.
Political candor
Given the stakes and pointedness involved in the arguments over the Dry Gulch project, the debate at the past few PAWSD meetings has been remarkably candid and fair. There have been over 10 hours of public debate about Dry Gulch and fees associated with its planning and development. I was called upon by Board President Karen Wessels thirteen times at one meeting. Nobody but Michael Whiting has thirteen worthwhile points to make during a two-hour meeting.
The PAWSD board has been dramatically candid about the condition of the water distribution system at these meetings.
At the April PAWSD meeting, board member Bob Huff was remarkably frank, “For about the past thirty years, we built a nice little water system, and it worked, and we just rode it and we sat here with very low fees and I fought with the board and its previous members because there was never any capital replacement. Nobody did it. Any reasonable business knows that you are going to have to replace your capital at some point. We never did.”
Huff added sorrowfully, “Suddenly, we have 290 miles of water pipe and a lot of it is getting rotten.”
Board member Windsor Chacey, at that same meeting, described the predicament resulting from past neglect. "We are trying very hard to upgrade disintegrating infrastructure."
 Assistant District Manager Gene Tautges did not pull any bureaucratic punches. “The Town’s water system is probably good for another 6, 7, 8 years.”
These were not statements surreptitiously taped at a work session, but statements made to a standing room only crowd of critics.
Last month in the County Courthouse during a debate over the size of the Dry Gulch project, Huff reported the same conditions to the Board of County Commissioners:
“A long time ago a developer came to this community and he built a water system and he handed it over to us. I don’t know whether it was good, bad or indifferent. And it has been expanded and the Town has joined it. And we have been riding along for 35 years or so on that water system basically. No capital replacement fund, and it has been depreciating, it has been decaying, and all of a sudden we wake up after 35 years and say, ‘We have got a problem. We have a decayed infrastructure.’”
There is little question, thanks to the frankness of such testimony, that the big losses of treated water are the fault of breakdowns in the distribution system. There are, however, minor losses of treated water which may be due to meter inaccuracy, and there are big questions about the use of unbilled, unmetered water at the district’s wastewater treatment plants. First, why should any large usage of treated water go unmetered? It detracts from the district’s arguments for best conservation practices to its customers. And it leaves a potentially large question mark in every analysis of district usage.
Second, with storage, treatment and distribution costs heading to $20,000 per acre foot and reservoir fees on a large house now set at nearly $25,000, how can water usage in one sanitation district go unbilled when half of the PAWSD water district is in the Town of Pagosa Springs Sanitation District. It might be very difficult to justify to a homebuilder (or their lawyer) that portion of a reservoir fee going to store, treat and distribute water free of charge to a wastewater district he or she does not belong to.
In a sense, the Water Conservation Plan jumps from chapter 3 to chapter 6. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to forecasts of future water demand. Forecasts which pretend that the water savings achieved over the past ten years have not occurred, and that future water conservation measures (budgeted for $3 million over the next ten years) will be unsuccessful. These forecasts for future water demand also assume that the candor of the PAWSD district about the need for capital reinvestment will not result in much reduced losses of treated water, an assumption that is hard to swallow.
Read Part Two...
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