Our recommendations for Pine Strawberry Water Improvement District (PSWID) board in the upcoming Nov. 2 election are:
Mr. Howard Matthews
Mr. Marvin Mortensen
Mr. Mike Claxton
October 21, 2010 PSWID Meeting
Next regular PSWID Meeting: Thursday November 18, 2010 at 7:30 PM at the Pine Cultural Center
Correction
In the last update I said that EMH was one of the companies that had participated in the pre-proposal activities. The correct reference to the company is MWH, which stands for Montgomery Watson Harza.
Board Hires CH2M Hill as Operations Management Company
The board voted unanimously to approve the hiring. Prior to that vote there was a presentation made by Mr. Mike Greer as to the financial feasibility of the contract. No details were provided on the scope of the contract, other than it is for four years and the price will be renegotiated every year. We will make Mr. Greer’s presentation available when we get a copy. Mr. Greer also stated that he would be happy to go through how the financial numbers were arrived at with members of the public.
Comment: I put in a request to Mr. Greer to go through the numbers and will share the results of that.
The board stated that there was no need to hire someone to manage the contract from the district’s side. They will be relying on board members to do that.
Mr. Danny Stevens was introduced as the new operations manager. Mr. Stevens is an employee of CH2M Hill and will be residing in the Pine-Strawberry area.
There was a great deal of concern expressed by the audience about the fate of the current employees with the takeover of operations by CH2M Hill. The board assured the audience that all of the current employees will be hired by CH2M Hill. Mr. Dennis Burrell, the current interim operations manager being provided by CH2M Hill, said that they value the knowledge of the current employees and had every intention of keeping them on. He also stated that they did not have any centralized billing center where work might be shifted to.
Mr. David Davis, PSWID attorney did note that there was no contractual way to enforce this.
Mr. Burrell also said that CH2M Hill has many operations of this size. He said that they have been managing Prescott Valley for 18 years and that they have many other operations contracts where they have been in place for long periods of time. Mr. Tom Weeks said that he spoke to the person managing the Prescott Valley contract and that they are very happy with CH2M Hill.
Comment: From an operations point of view, this is probably the best of the choices that the district currently has. While the current staff is capable, the district seems to be just treading water without any knowledgeable leadership. Hopefully, CH2M Hill will provide the additional expertise and experience needed. Given the board’s track record at estimating costs, it’s likely that this will end up costing much more than they think, but time will tell.
Seasonal Meters
Board voted to convert all seasonal meters to permanent meters
Strawberry Hollow Well (SH3) Status
The purchase is in escrow and there has been bank approval. The bank approval seems to have hinged upon a valuation provided by CH2M Hill.
Milk Ranch Well Status
Mr. Burrell stated that the old pump and motor have been fished out of the well. Seventy-five feet of accumulated sand has been removed and the perforations have been cleaned out.
Mr. Burrell stated that a new pump will be installed next week and a 30 day pump test will be started. At the completion of that pump test an evaluation of the well will be made.
Comment: The well hasn’t run since June and 75 feet of sand accumulated in six months. Seems like quite a lot of sand for that period of time. Mr. Lovetro said at the Sept 18th RCW meeting that there was 150 feet of sand and said that the company that had been hired to originally clean out the well hadn’t gone to the 1050 foot depth that they were supposed to. Seems to be some confusion on the story here.
As of the end of September the total expenditure on repairs, improvements, and evaluation of the Milk Ranch well is $130,186.52.
Misc
There was discussion about replacing a fire hydrant that was removed during Brooke’s ownership of the water system. Mr. Dave Prechtel from the Fire board asked for some cooperation in determining an approach and to perhaps use CH2M Hill’s buying power to get a better cost for the fire hydrant.
There was some discussion of how to deal with several customers who had had disputes with Brooke that led them to not pay bills and have their meters pulled. These disputes (sounded like there were two of them) were about improper installation by Brooke. Since this is a he said/she said type of issue, district will just go ahead and take the word of the owners and rectify the problems without further discussion.
Mr. Ray Pugel spent some time quizzing the district’s attorney about whether there is anything the district could sue Brooke Utilities for. Mr. Pugel seems to think that there is more water loss than was reported to the ACC and that this was fraudulent information. Mr. Davis, suggested that that was a long shot and that less of a long shot would be a class action by the residents of Strawberry to try and recover part of the $900,000 award that Brooke received in a lawsuit some years ago against someone who was illegally taking water from the system to fill a pond. (My knowledge of the details of that is sketchy at best).
Mr. Fred Krafczyk, nominal head of Rim Country Water, got up and complained because Mr. Don Smith had recruited the other candidates, Mr. Matthews and Mr. Mortensen, to run against the Rim Country Water slate of Mr. Greer, Mr. Calderon, and Mr. Claxton.
i. Comment: Mr. Krafczyk implied that there is such a tremendous desire in the community for what the board is doing that they should run unopposed. Nov. 2 should give an indication of what the community is thinking. If they have the mandate of the community that they have been claiming then they have nothing to worry about.
ii. Comment: As a historical note, when I ran for the board in 2008 Mr. Krafczyk stood up in a PSWID meeting and complained that by my running, the RCW candidates were not unopposed in the election. He said that this was all part of a plot between me and Brooke to drain the PSWID treasury of $27,000 for the cost of the election. Gila County Elections was actually estimating $1500 for the cost of the election, and the actual cost was about half of that. It would seem that Mr. Krafczyk is not a fan of elections. He never did apologize for his unfounded accusation.
This update is from the group Water for Pine Strawberry. We will be providing an update after each of the PSWID meetings with a summary of what the board did, additional facts that are relevant to what went on, and some commentary. Emails on earlier meetings are available on our website: www.WaterForPineStrawberry.com .
Water For Pine Strawberry is a group of residents who are concerned about the communities water issues and how they can best be resolved. Visit our web site, www.WaterForPineStrawberry.com, for more information. The website for PSWID is www.pswid.org .
Clarifications can be submitted by anyone who is explicitly named, implicitly identifiable, or a board member to items in this email. Clarifications will be posted on our website. We reserve the right to post a response. Clarifications must deal with the topics discussed in the email that relate to the individual or the board. They must be in family friendly language and be non-abusive. When the clarification is accepted, it will be posted to the website and notice of that posting will be added to the next update.
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