Water system woes shared across small communities
‘Aging infrastructure, aging operators, aging board members’
The board meeting of the small water system in Arroyo Hondo is by no means a fancy affair. The five members, bookkeeper and water operator get together once a month in a living room of a house halfway between the post office and the bar. A plate of lemon squares sat on the center table and a gray cat sauntered across the freshly printed agendas.
Humble as it was, there was no shortage of topics to discuss Tuesday night (June 25).
Up the road was a busted pipe someone would have to deal with. The bank needed even more documents and a grant needed updated diagrams of the water system, so the members would have to go out and walk part of the line to map it. They had to talk about the cost of a membership to the water association, because the old fee just wasn’t enough. Somebody had been tampering with one of the main valves in the system, and because the whole system is gravity-fed, that was more than a minor annoyance. A few accounts had to be transferred, a few are delinquent. Who was going to make the Facebook page? Who just moved into that house over there? Who’s going to call the state?
“We work hard to make this system run,” said Tom Sanchez, president of the Lower Arroyo Hondo Mutual Domestic Water Community Association. “This is a community effort.”
Across Taos County, about 25% of people are served by 28 mutual domestic water consumer associations, or MDWCAs, like the one in Arroyo Hondo. Each system, with its series of pipes, booster pumps, shut-off valves and storage tanks, is unique.
But their challenges are similar.
Aging out
“What we see quite often [is] aging infrastructure, aging operators, aging board members,” said Joe Martinez, the acting bureau chief of the New Mexico Environment Department Drinking Water Bureau.
Take a look at just the issue of infrastructure. In Arroyo Hondo, a new customer needed their house hooked into the water line, which requires shutting off the water. But because it’s an older system with no real way to isolate that area, they had to shut off the water for half of the members of the association.
That’s a mild issue. In the past two weeks alone, more serious issues have plagued communities on both ends of the county.
A pump had to be replaced in the Ranchos de Taos MDWCA. “The water got real slow. It got a little better, and then it just died. You’d turn the water on and nothing came out except a rattle, like somebody didn’t know how to blow a trumpet quite right,” said Robert Spillers, a resident in the area. The system is now back in service.
And to the north, a pump in the Cerro MDWCA wasn’t pulling up water fast enough, so the community’s storage tank ran low and people lost water pressure for a few days.
“Remember that our community is running on a well from 1941,” Vilma Baillon, president of the Cerro MDWCA, posted on Facebook during the outage.
The water system is back on line, but the issue of the well points to yet another challenge all these small systems grapple with: scraping together enough funding actually to make headway on needed maintenance.
The association built a new well in 2008. “Unfortunately we can’t use it because [there is] no capital outlay funding” to finish tying the well into the rest of the system, Baillon told members.
Finding money
State capital outlay funding is essentially grant money the Legislature generally hands out each year, though former Governor Susana Martinez vetoed the capital outlay bill several years ago when the state coffers were low. Small water systems, acequias, municipal governments and other beneficiaries of the capital outlay funds sometimes have to ask for money for years, if not more than a decade, in order finally to get enough money to do a big project.
The 2019 capital outlay bill highlights that dynamic.
Various government entities in Taos County received about $22.5 million in capital outlay money this year. The largest allocation was $3.2 million for the Taos County Veterans Cemetery. The smallest was $25,000 to replace the water tank, installed in 1984, for the Ojo Caliente MDWCA; it was also the only Taos County project vetoed by Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham.
Tripp Stelnicki, director of communications for the governor’s office, said the funding “was insufficient to complete a functional phase of the project,” which is why it was vetoed.
The water association needs a quarter-million dollars for a new tank and land to put it on.
Other sources of funding include different grants and loans from the USDA Rural Development Program, as well as pools of money from the state Water Trust Board, State Board of Finance, block grants and revolving loan funds from the state environment department and state finance authority.
Martinez, the head of the drinking water bureau, said that while the department works with small water systems to explain different funding sources, it’s ultimately up to the leaders of those systems to get the money they need. “We try to set them up so they are ready to go after some of those funds,” he said.
And some of the water systems have been successful in getting a sizeable chunk of money.
The Lower Arroyo Hondo MDWCA received roughly $785,000 in state grant money for a slew of upgrades including new water lines, new isolation valves and potentially even enough to install meters on each house tied into the system, something the association has never been able to do, according to Sanchez.
But that won’t cover the total bill for the project. The estimate was based on a bid from five years ago, meaning costs are undoubtedly higher now. “It’s crazy how expensive it is,” Sanchez said.
Construction won’t start until the fall at the earliest, he said.
Successful lobbying
In the far southern reaches of the county, the Trampas MDWCA has also been successful in getting money from the state and federal governments, which translates to real improvements for the roughly 130 people who depend on the system for their drinking water.
“We try to stay on top of capital outlay and state money ... try to get into these programs that provide a lot of grant and just a little loan,” said Trampas water association president and operator Alex Lopez.
Lopez usually goes down to the Legislature when it is in session to lobby for the water system.
It’s paid off. They are currently working on a project to replace a number of hydrants and to blend water from the two wells to improve quality. Last year, they upgraded all the meters so they can check usage remotely, cutting down on the amount of time it takes to bill people each month. And in the 2000s, there was a serious upgrade of the whole system, Lopez said; they managed to pay back the 40-year loan in just a decade.
“When you have that kind of record, they don’t hesitate” to give the water system even more money for even more improvements, he said.
Folks like Lopez and Sanchez are invaluable assets to their community water associations. But the bench isn’t stacked with people ready to take over the daily responsibilities of keeping these systems humming.
“Always the same people who show up” to meetings, said Lopez, who has been president of the water system since 1997. “Not too many new people and a whole bunch of old people around,” he said.
“I’ve been trying to get a young person to help us out. We have some young people in the community — they’re really smart, too — but they’re really, really busy,” Lopez said.
Even if Lopez were to find someone to hand the water system off to, there’s another 27 water associations and a large section of the Taos County population facing the same sobering reality.