Half the pipe replacement downtown as new estimates come in on $9.4-million water project, while water rates still expected to increase 56 percent to 79 percent in April

by Kathleen Sloan | February 22, 2020
5 min read
​Over the last month, while the Truth or Consequences City Commission gears up to pass a massive water- rate increase to pay for a $9.4-million project, City staff and city-hired  engineering firm Wilson & Company have spouted wildly different numbers on the water system’s leak rate. 

Is it leaking a not-crisis 17.4 percent, as City Water and Wastewater Director Jesse Cole claims from his January water audit? Or is it leaking a get-this-fixed-now 47 percent, as Wilson concluded in a study that came out Sept. 2019?

If it’s the smaller percentage, the system is not in crisis mode and the City would have time to further study and cost-analyze the project, as several residents have suggested during the three town halls the City has held. 

Wilson Project Manager Alfredo Holquin revealed at the final town hall that his company has been hired to do a preliminary engineering study on the whole water system. The final town hall was Feb. 19.

It might make sense to wait for the overall study rather than going forward with the $9.4-million piecemeal project, suggested Ron Fenn, who is running for City Commission Seat 5 in the upcoming March 3 election. 

The $9.4-million project will fix downtown pipes and the City’s sole and inadequate chlorination system. Water is purified in a too-small tank that needs duplication and more storage capacity. 

In a second revelation, Holquin said the pipe-replacement portion will be cut in half. Only 11,000, not 22,000 linear feet of pipe will be replaced downtown, initial estimates being too low. That cuts the proportion of “critical” pipes being replaced in the system from 30 percent to 15 percent. 

Wilson only looked at downtown water pipes, as directed by City staff, based on a 2015 engineering study that said those pipes are the oldest, made of concrete asbestos and leak an enormous amount. But now, according to Cole, that amount is not so egregious. 

At the Jan. 26 City Commission meeting, Cole said the Wilson 47-percent leak rate was wrong because it didn’t account for the “3,000 to 6,000 gallons” that were included in the $8.15 water-bill base rate. But the City includes no gallons in the base rate. In a recent email to the Sierra County Sun, Cole had a different explanation for the disparity between the 17-percent and 47-percent leakage rate. 

“The audit numbers that the engineer was originally given was based on incomplete data,” Cole said. “We had to reach out to our billing software company to generate a report that used actual meter readings versus actual billed.  The original report was using data that didn’t have actual meter reading, only billed consumption . . . Once we were able to generate a report that showed true meter readings, instead of only billed consumption everything changed drastically.”

Since the downtown pipes aren’t leaking drastically and the new estimates cut pipe replacement in half, wouldn’t it make sense to master-plan the water system upgrades, Fenn suggested? The City’s five-year Infrastructure Capital Improvements Plan puts this project at year 2022, Fenn said, and 70 percent of the water system’s needed upgrades will cost $153 million, a figure worthy of master planning. 

Master planning, said Fenn, would identify the intricacies, interconnections, overlaps and cost savings of fixing water and sewer lines at the same time, possibly saving millions of dollars in streets being torn up and replaced. 

If master planning won’t happen, Fenn suggested the downtown water pipes in front of businesses not be replaced, as proposed in the $9.4-million project, but abandoned. New water lines should be put in the alley, where the sewer lines are already located, an upaved area, saving money on street repairs. Business and traffic would not be interrupted for nearly as long either, as it would in the current plan.  

The chlorination tank is “critical,” Fenn said, and should go forward. He asked for the third time how much that part of the project will cost, and Holquin still didn’t have an answer. 

Now that the town halls are done, it remains to be seen if any of the public input will be incorporated in the City’s plans. For more information on that input, please read: People want downtown businesses to pay for water system upgrades that solely benefit them

The Public Utility Advisory Board, which has three ex-City employees on the board, will vote on the rate hike at their Feb. 24 meeting, which begins at 5:30 and will be held at City Chambers.

City Manager Morris Madrid is an ex-officio member of the PUAB and sets the agenda and narrows the board’s focus. He told them to vote for one of the three rates proposed in a rate study done by Rural Community Assistance Corporation’s Karl Pennock. 

RCAC has been hired by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is the loan/grant agency on the $9.4-million project. It is responsible for ensuring the federal government gets its money back and it isn’t wasted. 

Pennock, in Scenario A, presents no change in water rates. The City won’t get the $5.47 million loan and $3.93 million grant from the USDA if it goes that route, he said.  

In Scenario B, rates will go up 3 percent in 2022 and subsequent years. That will pay for the $9.4-million project. 

In Scenario C, rates will go up 79 percent in 2020, 25 percent in 2022 and 3 percent a year thereafter. This will put some cash in the water system’s coffers for future repairs. 

The PUAB vote will be relayed to the City Commission, which focus will also probably be narrowed to a vote on the rate hike by Madrid, rather than allowing for a broader discussion and decision on the project and rate hike. Only one City Commissioner attended one of the three town halls, George Szigeti, who opposed considering putting water pipes in the alley. 

The City Commission will vote on the matter at the Feb. 26 meeting, which starts at 9 a.m. at City Chambers. 

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Kathleen Sloan is the Sun’s founder and chief reporter. She can be reached at kathleen.sloan@gmail.com or 575-297-4146.
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Understanding New Mexico's proposed new social studies standards for K-12 students

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”
—National Council for the Social Studies 

Reader Michael L. Hayes of Las Cruces commented: What impresses me is that both the proposed standards and some of the criticisms of them are equally grotesque. I make this bold statement on the basis of my experience as a peripatetic high school and college English teacher for 45 years in many states with many students differing in race, religion, gender and socioeconomic background, and as a civic activist (PTA) in public education (My career, however, was as an independent consultant mainly in defense, energy and the environment.)

The proposed social studies standards are conceptually and instructionally flawed. For starters, a “performance standard” is not a standard at all; it is a task. Asking someone to explain something is not unlike asking someone to water the lawn. Nothing measures the performance, but without a measure, there is no standard. The teacher’s subjective judgment will be all that matters, and almost anything will count as satisfying a “performance standard,” even just trying. Students will be left to wonder “what is on the teacher’s mind?” or “have I sucked up enough.”

Four other quick criticisms of the performance standards. One, they are nearly unintelligible because they are written in jargon. PED’s use of jargon in a document intended for the public is worrisome. Bureaucrats often use jargon to confuse or conceal something uninformed, wrong or unworthy. As a result, most parents, some school board members and more than a few teachers do not understand them.

Two, the performance standards are so vague that they fail to define the education which teachers are supposed to teach, students are supposed to learn, and parents are supposed to understand. PED does not define words like “explain” or “describe” so that teachers can apply “standards” consistently and fairly. The standards do not indicate what teachers are supposed to know in order to teach or specify what students are supposed to learn. Supervisors cannot know whether teachers are teaching social studies well or poorly. The standards are so vague that the public, especially parents or guardians, cannot know the content of public education.

Three, many performance standards are simply unrealistic, especially at grade level. Under “Ethnic, Cultural and Identity Performance Standards”; then under “Diversity and Identity”; then under “Kindergarten,” one such standard is: “Identify how their family does things both the same as and different from how other people do things.” Do six-year-olds know how other people do things? Do they know whether these things are relevant to diversity and identity? Or another standard: “Describe their family history, culture, and past to current contributions of people in their main identity groups.” (A proficient writer would have hyphenated the compound adjective to avoid confusing the reader.) Do six-year-olds know so much about these things in relation to their “identity group”? Since teachers obviously do not teach them about these other people and have not taught them about these groups, why are these and similar items in the curriculum; or do teachers assign them to go home and collect this information?

Point four follows from “three”; some information relevant to some performance measures requires a disclosure of personal or family matters. The younger the students, the easier it is for teachers to invade their privacy and not only their privacy, but also the privacy of their parents or guardians, or neighbors, who may never be aware of these disclosures or not become aware of them until afterward. PED has no right to design a curriculum which requires teachers to ask students for information about themselves, parents or guardians, or neighbors, or puts teachers on the spot if the disclosures reveal criminal conduct. (Bill says Jeff’s father plays games in bed with his daughter. Lila says Angelo’s mother gives herself shots in the arm.) Since teacher-student communications have no legal protection to ensure privacy, those disclosures may become public accidentally or deliberately. The effect of these proposal standards is to turn New Mexico schools and teachers into investigative agents of the state and students into little informants or spies.

This PED proposal for social studies standards is a travesty of education despite its appeals to purportedly enlightened principles. It constitutes a clear and present danger to individual liberty and civil liberties. It should be repudiated; its development, investigated; its PED perpetrators, dismissed. No state curriculum should encourage or require the disclosure of private personal information.

I am equally outraged by the comments of some of T or C’s school board members: Christine LaFont and Julianne Stroup, two white Christian women, who belong to one of the larger minorities in America and assume white and Christian privileges. In different terms but for essentially the same reason, both oppose an education which includes lessons about historical events and trends, and social movements and developments, of other minorities. They object to the proposal for the new social studies standards because of its emphasis on individual and group identities not white or Christian. I am not going to reply with specific objections; they are too numerous and too pointed.

Ms. LaFont urges: “It’s better to address what’s similar with all Americans. It’s not good to differentiate.” Ms. Stroup adds: “Our country is not a racist country. We have to teach to respect each other. We have civil rights laws that protect everyone from discrimination. We need to teach civics, love and respect. We need to teach how to be color blind.”

Their desires for unity and homogeneity, and for mutual respect, are a contradiction and an impossibility. Aside from a shared citizenship, which implies acceptance of the Constitution, the rule of law and equality under the law, little else defines Americans. We are additionally defined by our race, religion, national origin, etc. So mutual respect requires individuals to respect others different from themselves. Disrespect desires blacks, Jews or Palestinians to assimilate or to suppress or conceal racial, religious or national origin aspects of their identity. The only people who want erasure of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-American origin aspects of identity are bigots. Ms. LaFont and Ms. Stroud want standards which, by stressing similarities and eliding differences, desire the erasure of such aspects. What they want will result in a social studies curriculum that enables white, Christian, native-born children to grow up to be bigots and all others to be their victims. This would be the academic equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

H.E.L.P.

This postmortem of a case involving a 75-year-old women who went missing from her home in Hillsboro last September sheds light on the bounds of law enforcement’s capacity to respond, especially in large rural jurisdictions such as Sierra County, and underscores the critical role the public, as well as concerned family and friends, can play in assisting a missing person’s search.

Reader Jane Debrott of Hillsboro commented: Thank you for your article on the tragic loss of Betsey. I am a resident of Hillsboro, a friend of Rick and Betsey, and a member of H.E.L.P. The thing that most distresses me now, is the emphasis on Rick’s mis-naming of the color of their car. I fear that this fact will cause Rick to feel that if he had only gotten the facts right, Betsey may have been rescued before it was too late. The incident was a series of unavoidable events, out of everyone’s control, and we will never know what place the correct color of her car may have had in the outcome. It breaks my heart to think that Rick has had one more thing added to his “what ifs” concerning this incident.

Diana Tittle responded: Dear Jane, the Sun undertook this investigation at the request of a Hillsboro resident concerned about the town’s inability to mount a prompt, coordinated response to the disappearance of a neighbor. From the beginning, I shared your concern about how our findings might affect Betsy’s family and friends. After I completed my research and began writing, I weighed each detail I eventually chose to include against my desire to cause no pain and the public’s right to know about the strengths and limitations of law enforcement’s response and the public’s need to know about how to be of meaningful assistance.

There was information I withheld about the state police investigation and the recovery. But I decided to include the issue of the car’s color because the individuals who spotted Betsy’s car emphasized how its color had been key to their identification of it as the vehicle described in Betsy’s Silver Alert. Because the misinformation was corrected within a couple of hours, I also included in this story the following editorial comment meant to put the error in perspective: “The fact that law enforcement throughout the state was on the lookout in the crucial early hours after Betsy’s disappearance for an elderly woman driving a “light blue” instead of a “silver” Accord would, in retrospect, likely not have changed the outcome of the search” [emphasis added].

I would also point to the story’s overarching conclusion about the inadvisability of assigning blame for what happened: “In this case, a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances, many of them beyond human control, hindered the search that it would fall to Hamilton’s department to lead.”

It is my hope that any pain caused by my reporting will eventually be outweighed by its contribution to a better community understanding of what it will take in the future to mount a successful missing person’s search in rural Sierra County.

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