INSIDE

More ‘hoop de doo’ from district

By Meg Olson

“So many hoops.”

Water district commissioner Sue Johnson shook her head as district manager Dan Bourks read a list of nine administrative and planning tasks that would need to be checked off before the district could move ahead with any water hook-up allocation process: an updated comprehensive plan and capital improvement plan outlining how the district will develop additional capacity to serve more connections; review of the plan under state environmental laws and the public hearings that go with it; a new connection fee to pay for added system capacity and more public hearings.

“There’s a few months to go through all this,” Bourks said at the September 14 regular water district meeting. Bourks later said that to meet all the procedural requirements the district may have to wait until May to allocate the approximately 140 connections the district has left under limits set by the state based on current water supply, storage and usage. “I’m really hoping before that,” he said. The current moratorium on new water connections, which went into effect in July 2005 and has been extended several times, is due to expire in January 2007. It can be extended by action of the water district board of commissioners.

Renee Coe accepted the need to be procedurally rigorous in updating district plans and developing system capacity, but urged fellow commissioners to do everything possible so that once the district could hand out the connections, it was ready to go. “Between now and then I think it’s important for us to hold one or two work sessions every month and get all the paperwork ironed out, the schedule and timeline,” Coe said, suggesting that they start by engaging an accounting firm to run the allocation, eliminating a potential delay down the road. “That way we can run with the ball when we catch it,” agreed commissioner Madeleine Anderson.

At their September 20 work session commissioners did not draft a letter to engage a firm to run the allocation, but instead answered a dozen written entreaties, demands and complaints that have become standard monthly fare for the board as the moratorium drags on. In response to a lengthy letter from Fritz Mueller commissioners refuted the claim that an August 23 meeting of district management and legal counsel with representatives from Stanton development meant the district was “already negotiating terms of an agreement” that would give the developer connections in exchange for a commitment to build the storage needed for the district to be allowed to issue more connections.

While district manager had described the meeting as “good,” commissioners wrote to Mueller that the meeting was only for the developer to present their proposal to legal staff. “No decisions or agreements were made,” they wrote. “This meeting was for informational purposes only.”