Troubled Waters

As evidenced by the story that appears on the front page of this paper the city of Port St. Joe is in something of a pickle.

A $21 million investment in a new water plant, a plant that could position the city as a regional supplier of potable water, is being undermined by what is in the ground.

And what is the ground is infrastructure, specifically pipes and valves, which is aging, incapable of being located or have plain reached the end its shelf life.

The city has a fine new water plant and a distribution system for that plant that was largely constructed when the Great Depression and World War II were considered current news events.

While one city commissioner labeled the new water plant as a waste of money considering all the problems the city has had in meeting water safety limits as well as citizen complaints about cloudy or discolored water, the reality is the plant was a necessity.

The Northwest Florida Water Management District, given the city’s level of water being pulled from the underground Floridan Aquifer, insisted the city get off the deep wells and tap a surface water source.

The water management district helped facilitate the purchase of the freshwater canal bringing the Chipola River, the canal’s source, into reach of the city as a source for water.

The surface water plant proposal was met with considerable fanfare and city officials have watched hopefully as the plant rose from the ground.

But there were clearly issues going forward that nobody seemed to have even thought about, let alone addressed, when it came to bringing this plant online.

And that seems amazing but not necessarily a full surprise.

The city was flush with money and advance tap fees from The St. Joe Company help finance the plant. City revenues were heading up.

I am reminded of what sage city attorney Tom Gibson said during a meeting not long ago.

Paraphrasing here, he said at one time deals could be made by a handshake and a promise and those days are gone.

This water plant seems a fine example, while noting that hindsight does provide 20/20 vision.

Somewhere, at some point, the city and its taxpayers have been let down by the experts in constructing this new water plant.

After all, it is not like the pipes in the ground turned from Miley Cyrus to Phyllis Diller overnight.

The mayor succinctly said this was a problem decades in the making and where were the experts through several commissions and two mayors when it came to providing answers as to what would happen once the main valve was turned at the water plant.

It seems almost beyond belief that it is just now coming to light that mapping of the city’s infrastructure is, well, not quite on par with what Lewis and Clark must have had to work with.

The water management district, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the engineers, none of their representatives were just sitting around one day and shooting the breeze and the topic of the atrocious state of the city’s pipes never came up?

No one ever asked what might happen when water everybody agreed was going to be of very different composition than the city had previously used for drinking water came in contact with pipes that were laid before Eisenhower was president?

No one ever considered that those 10 or so maps laying about showing the city’s water and sewer infrastructure at various points in time might need to be examined, modeled together and assessed for their accuracy and relative merit?

Simply put the city, through several administrations, was not getting the best, or at least most thorough, guidance and certainly not advice fueled by vision and long-range planning in mind that was required of a project of such a massive scale.

That is too bad because the heydays of the real estate market are only now beginning to slowly creep back and the city’s flush days are in the rearview mirror.

This means that we as consumers of the city’s water will likely get the bill for the lack of foresight and planning that went into this project.

Because it is clear from last week’s special meeting, reported on the front page of this paper, that the city likely has an infrastructure project in front of it that will possibly cost as much or more than the plant’s $21 million.

There will be attempts to secure grants – another taxpayer-funded item, it should be noted – but the bottom line is the city is looking at replacing as many as 20 miles of pipe in the coming years.

That is going to require no small expenditure of funds. This will not be cheap.

And where that burden is likely to fall, be it property owners or more likely consumers around the county of the city’s water, will be paying for all that replacement.

Maybe it would have all shaken out that way in the end under any scenario.

At the same time, it is not a difficult stretch to believe that with that $21 million, the city might have been able to address infrastructure, at least in part, and maybe gone with a less expensive model for a plant.

No matter, for what counts is the lack of a broader vision and thinking that needs to replace the promise and a handshake of old.