Tale of two wells, turning pros into amateurs

WATER FOR 
PINE STRAWBERRY
UPDATE

(Blog editor's note: The following is another excerpted update from the watchdog group Water for Pine Strawberry.  The Gazette Blog reprints these updates as a public service but does not vouch for the accuracy of their contents nor the views expressed therein.   We welcome opposing viewpoints and will provide equal space for them.)

March 17, 2011 PSWID Meeting
Next regular PSWID Meeting: Thursday May 19, 2011 at 7:30 PM at the PSWID Office

Newly “Discovered” Well Site To Be Developed
The Pine Strawberry Water Improvement District (PSWID) Board announced that it had been “discovered” that the district owns an acre adjacent to the Milk Ranch well site and land behind the Prudential office in Pine. Apparently this was uncovered when doing surveys for Milk Ranch well work.

Comment: Every time that I think things can’t get any more bizarre, the PSWID board comes up with something more unbelievable. It is certainly “convenient” that this property was “discovered” after the Milk Ranch well was purchased. Must be that they never bothered to look at the list of assets they bought from Brooke, or perhaps they were told not to. It is hard to imagine that Mr.(Ray) Pugel, being a realtor and developer, wouldn’t know who owned the property adjacent to his. I suspect that it just slipped his mind to mention that.

Mr. Ralph Bossert, the PSWID District Engineer, gave a presentation on drilling an additional well on the newly “discovered” site and connecting it into the line that is planned for the Milk Ranch well. The presentation can be found at: http://www.waterforpinestrawberry.com/data%20pages/BudgetDocs.htm .

The two wells would be about 500 feet apart. The portion they have access to and is more than 100 feet from the nearest septic system is in the Pine Creek floodway. A floodway limits what you can build. Anything built needs to not restrict or redirect the flow of water during flooding. The wellhead can be put in a floodway, but structures like a storage tank or booster pump cannot. Preliminary discussions with ADEQ indicate that there are no regulatory barriers to drilling the well

The new well will be a replica of the Milk Ranch well, same diameter and depth and expected to produce the same 85 gpm of dirty water. The cost to drill and connect the well is estimated to be $164,530.

Comment: As of the end of February, the district has spent $175,797 repairing, improving, and testing the Milk Ranch well. For less than that, the district is creating a brand new Milk Ranch well. For the privilege of basically buying Mr. Pugel and Mr. Randall a whole new well, we had to pay them $571,000.

The board voted to proceed with the drilling project and reallocated the $165,000 that was in the budget to provide filtering to clean the Milk Ranch well water to this project.

Mr. Gary Lovetro said: “The long term commitment for this community was to, over five to ten years, achieve 600 gpm. With this project will be at 630.”

Comment: One of the main issues that we have had with this board is that they are spending $2.25 million without a plan. They have been clear that they are going to make a master plan for the water system after this money is spent. A master plan would indicate what the priorities are for adding water supplies, storage, and replacing old infrastructure. That way the district would be able to prioritize the spending so that it had the most overall value to the community. It would use growth projections, to determine how much more capacity is needed, rather than a number of 600 gpm which was picked out of the air.

Based on our analysis, the purchase of the Strawberry Hollow well and a water sharing agreement with Portals IV would have secured us for the short-term, allowing the master plan to be completed. Instead of pursuing a water sharing agreement, the Milk Ranch well was purchased which more than covers the short-term needs of Pine.

Now they are hurrying to spend money on yet another well in Pine. By Mr. Lovetro’s own admission, they didn’t think they needed that much capacity until five to ten years from now. All of this capacity has been added in Pine, but it is impractical to send large volumes of water from Pine to Strawberry. A master plan would tell us what Strawberry’s needs are going to be and whether additional capacity should be added there.

The only benefit that Strawberry is getting out of this $2.25 million, which Strawberry is paying a third of, is that they don’t have to send water to Pine any more. Is that enough to secure Strawberry’s water future? Who knows? This board is insistent that they won’t make a plan before the money is gone.

Mr. Lovetro also said: “I’m sure people are out there saying why did you spend so much on Milk Ranch well when you could get this one for $165,000. Well, it can’t happen without Milk Ranch well, we can’t put the tank, we can’t put the booster, we can’t put the infrastructure that we are going to have at Milk Ranch well. So this is something that is addition to Milk Ranch well and is basically a plus to Milk Ranch. It is an incremental well. If we take the costs for the two projects and divide by two, I think we will have both hooked up and in the system for about $400,000 apiece, which you can’t drill anything for that kind of money.”

Comment: To Mr. Lovetro’s “Well, it can’t happen without Milk Ranch well, we can’t put the tank, we can’t put the booster, we can’t put the infrastructure that we are going to have at Milk Ranch well.” Mr. Lovetro is correct that, from the political point of view, Milk Ranch had to come first because Mr. Pugel would have fought tooth and nail to prevent the district from developing an alternative to his well, just as he did with the K2 project and just as he did when the prior board began to explore drilling their own well. Mr.

Lovetro is also correct that the tank and booster pump can’t be put in a floodway, however, he is being too short sighted. The tank and booster pump don’t have to be close to the well head, so they could have been positioned somewhere in the area. Perhaps the district has other “undiscovered” property in the area that would have been suitable for the storage tank and booster pump. Given the $746,000 that was spent to repair, improve, and purchase the Milk Ranch well, the district could have purchased some land for the storage tank and booster pump and saved half a million.

Comment: To Mr. Lovetro’s “If we take the costs for the two projects and divide by two, I think we will have both hooked up and in the system for about $400,000 apiece, which you can’t drill anything for that kind of money.” This is incorrect in two ways. The first is that Mr. Lovetro continues to be math challenged. The total estimated cost of the two wells is $1.17 million, half of that is $585,000, not $400,000. The other is the claim that drilling costs for a well are substantially more than $400,000, so this is a great deal. This is false because this new well is being drilled for only $165,000 and when you add the same connection cost as the Milk Ranch well, it comes in at $411,000. Certainly a good deal less than the $1 million that has been spent on the Milk Ranch well.

Milk Ranch Well Status
According to Mr. Danny Stevens the engineering effort for the Milk Ranch well is about 80% complete. They had a preliminary meeting with ADEQ to talk to them about what was being planned and are following their directions. When the engineering plans are completed, an application will be filed with ADEQ for approval. When approval is received, the purchasing of material will start.

Comment: A Brazen Sense of Entitlement to Your Money
Mr. Ray Pugel made the following statement at the board meeting: “I would just like to add, because I think that you are being too polite to say it, but a lot of dollars were wasted by amateurs trying to run the project at Milk Ranch that had no business doing it, and fortunately once you got a professional it was slammed and done. The other people who professed to be professionals, in fact they wasted your money, our money, my money.”

Mr. Pugel has been making it a theme over the last several board meetings to talk about how the previous people had “wasted” his and our money.

There are two perspectives here, one is from Mr. Pugel’s perspective and the other is from the community’s perspective. From Mr. Pugel’s perspective he no doubt feels that the money spent by the district increasing the value of his property was not wasted. The “waste” was anything that didn’t increase his wealth or that delayed the transfer of that money to him. This goes along with the views that he gave at the June 19 PSWID meeting, which boiled down to stating what an honor the community was receiving to be able pay to repair and improve his well. The other perspective is from the point of view of the community. For the community, every dollar was wasted since they were spent to the benefit of Mr. Pugel and not to the benefit of the customers and taxpayers of the district.

In fact, in addition to every dollar spent to repair and improve Mr. Pugel’s and Mr. Robert Randall’s well, it created an additional cost to the community in the purchase price. Neither Mr. Pugel nor Mr. Randall was a destitute property owner who was unable to fund the needed repairs to their property. They chose to push what would be the responsibility of any other owner onto their neighbors. Their control of the PSWID board allowed them to do that.

The other item to address is Mr. Pugel’s definition of “amateur” and “professional”. His definition appears to be that you are an “amateur” if you are not working for his interests, and you are a “professional” if you are. The group that he labels as “amateur” committed the crime of coming up with information that showed that the value of the Milk Ranch well was being grossly overstated and that there are going to be significant costs to clean the water and connect it into the system. Case in point, Mr. Mike Ploughe was the District Hydrologist and one of those that has now become an “amateur”. However, before Mr. Pugel came to view Mr. Ploughe as not working for his interests, Mr. Pugel often held Mr. Ploughe’s views in high esteem and used them to argue for what he wanted to have happen.

The “professional” Mr. Bossert came up with the same connection cost estimate that the now “amateur” Tetra Tech did, but Mr. Bossert isn’t seen as a threat at this point. The difference between the set of “amateurs”, Mr. Ploughe, Tetra Tech, and Mr. Bill Haney, and today’s “professionals” is that the first group wanted to provide clean water to Pine and Strawberry and the second group will settle for dirty water. The bottom line is Mr. Pugel isn’t going to let a little thing like clean water get between him and our money.

Mr. Pugel needs to have a villain that he can point to so that he can keep people’s attention away from what he is doing. Mr. Pugel lost his villain when Mr. Hardcastle and Brooke Utilities left town. He seemed a bit lost for awhile, but now he is elevating the “amateurs” to that role.

This update is from the group Water For Pine Strawberry. Updates 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 community’s 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 update. Clarifications will be posted on our website. We reserve the right to post a response. Clarifications must deal with the topics discussed in the update 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.