SPECIAL STORY: Small Town Solutions: Preston

Each city faces its own set of challenges. Often, those challenges are bigger than the amount of resources and staff than smaller cities are equipped for.

But the problems are not often not unique to one city – many of the problems that go unnoticed in smaller towns in Eastern Idaho, can affect many other towns too.

The city of Preston is facing three problems at once and is working to come up with solutions fast.

The first deals with a sewage treatment plant. The current one is decades old and according to the DEQ, not up to par.

The second problem deals with a very aging pipeline that is also 18 miles out of town.

The third is, the city has no secondary water source so if that aging pipeline fails, it could spell trouble.

The current sewage treatment plant is between 20 to 30 years old and costs the city more in upkeep than it would to build a whole new plant.

“The treatment we have right now is called a boat clarifier and I’ve been told there’s only like one or two in the state – there’s just not a lot of them,” said Tyrell Simpson, city engineer. “There wasn’t a lot of them designed and built and so we have a really aged system that’s hard to get parts for and it’s just not working properly.”

The city water has a high phosphorus level which is part of the reason it doesn’t meet DEQ standards. That’s one issue a new plant would help to address.

However, there’s a snag on both sides of the waterway – if they build a new plant, there’s roadblocks. If it’s not built, there could be repercussions.

“Where the current facility is sitting, there’s not a whole lot of space and so one of the challenges that we’re going to have in replacing the sewer plant is we’ve got to come up with a design with the new treatment plant to be able to keep the old one – the existing one – in service while we construct a new one,” Simpson said.

The new sewer plant has to be online and running to DEQ standards within the next seven years.

If it’s not done, the city could be heavily fined.

“We cannot put the citizenry at risk here of having penalties that could be into the tens of thousands of dollars, and some of those are per diem, as far as being penalized by the DEQ or EPA,” said Steven Fuller, chair of the city infrastructure committee.

With the other two issues, it deals more with water resources.

The city’s only current source of water in an 18-mile pipeline that is 50 years old and sits across several earthquake fault lines. If that pipeline fails, the city has no other water source. And the mayor says, that pipeline is already showing a few cracks, and about a mile of it has already had to be fixed.

“Secondary water sources are necessary because if the primary source fails, then we need a secondary source to avoid literally a disaster of having no water,” Fuller said.

To try and combat the problems, several months ago, Mayor Mark Beckstead put together the Preston City Infrastructure Committee which is made up of community members.

The goal is to come up with possible, reasonable solutions that could work for the majority of citizens. They will then present those possible solutions to the city council.

One option the committee said could be a possibility is looking at doing things like drilling a well, or converting city water shares it has in places like Glendale Reservoir, into storage and use those.

But Fuller said that would still only barely provide enough water for just in-home use and it would not allow much room for future city growth.

Another thing the committee said it has to consider is raising monthly fees on sewer and water. Doing that would help grow the reserves to help cover some of the cost for a new plant and pipeline down the road.

“One other thing to consider with this too, is that we just got our water study back from the state about a month ago and our costs are lower than most,” explained Kelly Mickelsen, city treasurer and committee liason. “We allow them up to 50,000 gallons before we charge them an overage. Most other places are higher – higher rates than we are right now.”

Something else the city has done in the last month or so is implementing new connection fees for incoming subdivisions. That puts the cost burden of connecting to water and sewer back on the developer, rather than the city. Though that has helped with the amount of water being used and isn’t costing the city, Beckstead said that’s not a solution either – more of a necessity because on warm days, the city’s water storage is already being used up.

Fuller and Mayor Beckstead said the bottom line is, this is something the city can’t ignore – it has to do something.

“The problem we have here, with this, is there’s a ticking time clock and we’ve just got to face the music and get it taken care of,” Fuller said.

Even though Preston is facing these challenges now, it’s not an unfamiliar problem for other towns.

“I work with a lot of the small towns in our valley and they all have this same problem,” Fuller described. “Not the aging infrastructure, perhaps, but if it’s not that, it’s they’re running out of water.”

“We can either act or we can react,” Beckstead said.

So Preston is trying to be as proactive as it can.

The mayor asked the committee to come up with a five, ten and twenty year plan for this. That was never really done for the city before, which Beckstead said is part of the reason why is the city is where it’s at now with a ticking time clock.

He has some suggestions for other towns facing this issue, or who could be facing it.

“Just a bit of advice to other towns, if they don’t have a 5, 10 and 20 year plan for sewer and water, I would certainly suggest that,” Beckstead said. “People have asked me, what’s the worst thing about being the mayor? And really it is the sleepless nights of worrying about not being able to provide water to 6,000 people.”

The mayor said he wants the citizens to understand is that this is a problem that needs to be taken care of and there won’t be a perfect solution but the city has to do something.

The city estimates it will cost between $10 million and $15 million for the new sewer plant, plus another $17 million to $18 million for a new pipeline. Those prices of course could change in the next seven years but total, the city is looking at a price tag between $25 million to $35 million.

The committee said it is still developing some other possible ideas.

It hopes to have some suggestions to present to the city council within the next month.