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Sewer plant

City needs to sell voters on crucial item

The city of Durango is increasingly known for the fine amenities it offers residents and visitors. A stroll along the Animas River Trail makes it clear that quality of life is a high priority for the city and its residents. The Durango Community Recreation Center, the Durango Public Library, the city’s many fine parks, its abundant open space and its robust and growing public-art collection are just a few concrete metrics of a city committed to investing in itself.

Sometimes, though, the biggest items a city must fund are far less glamorous than Durango’s laundry list as of late. With a sewage treatment plant that is underperforming and nearing its capacity, the City Council must now turn its attention to a critical and expensive infrastructure project.

The Durango wastewater-treatment plan needs $55 million in upgrades on a semi-urgent timeline, particularly considering the cost. New state water-quality guidelines give the city until 2017 to reduce the levels of nitrogen and phosphorous it discharges into the Animas River, triggering algae blooms that starve fish and aquatic life of needed oxygen. Addressing this, as well as expanding the sewer plant’s capacity to accommodate future growth, is an essential city priority, without which the snazzier amenities lose their value.

But $55 million is a gasp-inspiring sum, particularly when it is for a project that typically draws little public interest – except, of course, when the wastewater-treatment services are not working. So the city has before it the large task of raising big money for a big, necessary and not-altogether-sexy project. It will have to begin with sewer rates for its existing customers, followed by a bond issue before voters in 2016. The City Council rejected a plan to double sewer rates beginning in 2016 and is looking at a tiered rate structure. Councilors will discuss the matter at its meeting tonight.

This is not an issue that will go away, nor can it be solved on the cheap. City-sewer customers will see their rates increase, and city voters will need to pass a bond issue to fund the upgrades. It is a matter of public as well as environmental health, and it requires significant investment to address. Alas, the $55 million will not produce an award-winning and wildly popular recreation facility or a well-stocked library, but it will take care, effectively, of the community’s sewage – something none in Durango would care to see undone.

As a plus, the improvements will eliminate the foul odor that surrounds the existing plant – a cloud that currently makes Durango’s Whitewater Park less appealing for boaters and spectators. By that argument, then, this critical investment will stretch beyond infrastructure and benefit recreation as well. Get involved in the sewer plant discussion, and prepare to support the process as it advances.



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