Hi Santaquin residents! This time around I’d like to address another head-scratcher in the “Stop the Waste” flyer Santaquin citizens have all received. The first bullet goes like this: “We believe that the proposed $9,900,000 bond for the proposed WRF is not needed at this time.” Next are some suppositions and a few national (not local) statistics. Then they jump into the second bullet, which was the basis for my last post. Finally, at the end of the second bullet they assert “There are still 23 years of payments left on the existing bond.”
I thought about this for a few minutes and an interesting parallel came to my mind. I’ve always liked shows about renovating older homes and also about new construction. When my wife and I first moved to Santaquin back in 1997, we purchased an existing home on 500 West. The home was modest and had an unfinished basement and no garage. This was fine for us as we only had two children at the time – a two-year-old daughter and my newborn son.
As Utah families often do, we started to grow in numbers. Over the next 11 years, we added two more sons and two more daughters, which made a total of six children. To accommodate the growth of our family, we finished the basement and built a detached garage. I believe this was a wise decision and it worked well for us.
As our children grew, we realized that everyone needed a little more room, so we started looking for a larger home here in Santaquin. We were fortunate to find a nice home just a few blocks away from our existing home and made the purchase in September 2008.
You’re probably asking yourself “so what does this have to do with the sewer issue?” Well, I’ll tell you. Just like my family, Santaquin started off small. We didn’t need a huge sewer facility and were able to make do with the lagoons on the west end of town, just like my family made do with a smaller home and unfinished basement. As the town grew, it was decided that the lagoons should be expanded in capacity to accommodate our growth. I did the same thing with my house – I finished the basement and added a garage to give us some room to grow.
Eventually, I had to face the decision of adding on to my existing home to meet the needs of my growing family or buying a new home. I evaluated the two options and found that the better investment was to buy a new home. Why? Well, adding on would have caused the home to be overbuilt for the neighborhood – I would not have been able to recoup my investment if/when I decided to sell at some future point in time. Second, interest rates were more favorable for purchasing a new home than they were for a home equity loan to add on.
Do you see the parallel with Santaquin’s sewer lagoons? We added a winter storage pond and oxygen chains several years ago to deal with the growth of the city. We’ve continued to grow, and we’ve evaluated the option to add on to the current lagoons or build a new mechanical treatment facility to better accommodate our growing population.
Expanding the lagoons is a temporary fix and does not add value to the existing property (and it will likely get us sued -
click here to see why). It is money we’ll walk away from in just a few short years when we’re faced with purchasing more and more expensive land to support a sprawling lagoon system.
In my opinion, adding a mechanical component to the current lagoons is even more short-sighted. A little bird that recently attended a "Stop the Waste" meeting told me the Askerlund/Broadhead/Jolley team is going to unveil this as their ten-year Band-Aid “solution” to the wastewater problem we’re now facing. Now why would we borrow 4-5 million dollars for 40 years for a fix that only gets us another ten years down the road? Ten years from now we will end up having to build the treatment plant we really should have built in the first place! Yes, we’re still paying on the lagoon systems for another 23 years. So I say again, why would we want to go into debt for 40 years for something that is only useful for ten? We will then be faced with paying for THREE bonds: the lagoons, a mechanical Band-Aid to the lagoons, and the MBR we should be building right now. That's like you and me trying to make payments on three mortgages!
One more parallel – When I moved out of my first home here in Santaquin, I still had several years left on the mortgage. By putting that home up for sale, I could have paid off the mortgage and just had the mortgage on my new home. The same goes for the city. If we build the MBR treatment plant, the land occupied by the sewer lagoons can be reclaimed and sold for development. The money from the sale can be used to pay down/off the existing bond so that we owe only on the current bonds used to finance the MBR.
The lagoons have served their purpose and it’s time to move on. Adding a mechanical process to the lagoons will cost millions of dollars and is only a Band-Aid, and you know how bad it hurts to get rid of a Band-Aid. Think about it - 23 years left to pay on the lagoons and now Askerlund/Broadhead/Jolly want us to borrow 4-5 million for 40 years to Band-Aid the current system? With this misguided plan, ten years from now we will run out of capacity AGAIN, and have to borrow money for another 40 years to build a mechanical plant somewhere else. Where is the fiscal responsibility in thatand what will it do to your sewer bill?
We know the interest rates we're being offered now are low - 1% and 3.375%, plus $6 million in grant money that doesn't have to be repaid. Despite what you may hear, there is no guarantee we will be able to negitiate similar interest rates from our lending partners if we fail to pass Propositions 1 & 2 on November 8th. These groups work through an
appointed board, and calling and getting opinion from one individual at the USDA or Utah Division of Water Quality isn't necessarily valid. One individual doesn't speak for the entire board, especially if that person doesn't actually sit on the board. The Utah Division of Water Quality publishes a project priority list and there are plenty of other towns and cities that are more than happy to use the money if we won't. You can access the list
here.
