City facing $3.5M water project

Council calls for emergency meeting Tuesday

By Janet Jacobs

The Corsicana City Council will hold an emergency meeting at 5 p.m. Tuesday to discuss an unexpected $3.6 million bill from the U.S. government.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced last April that it had gotten $107 million in federal stimulus money with which to work on Texas flood control and maintenance projects, including $7.5 million for the Navarro Mills Reservoir. The city was expected to match that with $2.6 million because the city is supposed to pay 25 percent of any maintenance and operations costs for the lake.

However, now that the bids have been opened, the cost for the project is closer to $12 million, making the city’s share over $3.5 million.

“That’s obviously not something we can just write a check for,” said City Manager Connie Standridge. “And the contract says its due in January 2011.”

When the project was first brought to the city in spring 2009, the city asked to be excused from its typical matching deal. A normal year’s maintenance and operations costs for Navarro Mills is about $325,000.

In lieu of being excused from any costs, the city asked for an easy, long-term payment plan, perhaps as long as 30 years.

“Since summer, we’ve had multiple discussions and arrived at absolutely nothing in writing,” Standridge said. “The $2.6 million was bad enough, and now it’s another million, and still no word as to how we’re going to repay this? That’s of great concern to us.”

Tuesday’s meeting will be to discuss what to do.

The city has suggested four actions: no payment at all; a long-term payment plan; stopping work until a mutual solution is found; and that U.S. Rep. Joe Barton dig into the problem in Washington.

All four are included in a draft resolution on Tuesday’s emergency meeting agenda.

Corsicana is not alone in its dilemma. Ennis and Waxahachie share Lake Bardwell, and similar stimulus-funded work has already begun on that lake. Ennis and Waxahachie will also share the cost of the Bardwell work, or about $700,000 to $1.5 million each, according to Steve Howerton, Ennis city manager.

The wide range of estimates is only part of the problem.

“The range is unacceptable, it’s just too indefinite. We need to know precisely what we have to pay,” he said. “We’ve completed three months of the budget year and we’re in the fourth month and these obligations continue to accrue and we don’t know what they are. That’s devastating in the current economic climate.”

The cities’ argument is that the purpose of the stimulus wasn’t to bankrupt small cities, but to help cities and counties.

“They’re mandating that cities subsidize the federal treasury,” Howerton said. “That was not the intent. The intent was for the federal government to be subsidizing local treasuries.”

The cities can’t just shrug off the costs. The cities buy the water through the Trinity River Authority which controls the water, and the Corps, which controls the dams. The River Authority will be billed for the work, and the bill will be passed along to the cities. The river authority can’t pay it either, according to Warren Brewer, general manager.

“We’re uncertain what would happen if Corsicana is unable to pay what it says is due, what we owe,” Brewer said. “The T.R.A. is dependent on Corsicana to pay this. We have no other source of revenue in which we could make the payments on Corsicana’s behalf. We’re uncertain what the Army Corps of Engineers would do if we were unable to pay for it.”

Brewer, like Howerton, believes this wasn’t the intention of Congress when it wrote the stimulus law, and it may require a congressional fix, he said.

“Possibly some congressional action that would clarify that improvements funded by stimulus money were not intended to back into a local tax, or cause a local sponsor to have to pay part of it,” Brewer said.

That was also attempted last year with little success.

“At that time, congress had moved forwards too far to back up, and we were not successful in getting a congressional fix at that time,” he said.

The most likely acceptable solution is the long-term payment plan, said Elston Eckhardt, chief of civil project management for the Fort Worth District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“We’ve developed some things we believe would relieve the cities, not of their debt, but it would allow them to potentially pay that over a period of time rather than in one year,” he said.

Some cities already have clauses in their contracts that allow for big projects to be funded over a couple of decades, but the Navarro Mills and Bardwell contracts don’t include that. The local corps office is asking to be able to amend the contracts to include that clause.

“So large replacement costs could be amortized or spread out across as much as 25 years,” Eckhardt said.

He added that it won’t happen quickly. Since discussions began last summer, the request has worked its way up the chain of command from Fort Worth to Dallas and is now in Washington D.C.

“I think there’s an excellent chance (of its approval,),” Eckhardt said. “We’re trying to provide them with every type of assistance we can, and make contracts so there’s something they can work with, and I think there’s an excellent chance.”

The lake will receive a hefty dose of new rip-rap to reinforce the dam, something which hasn’t been done in a long while. Some of the work will have to be done underwater, while some may be done from land, said Tim MacAllister, assistant chief of operations division, Fort Worth District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“Over the years, we have to go back in and replenish and restore that stuff,” he said.

The contract was let some time ago, but work is expected to begin next week, Eckhardt said.

—————

Janet Jacobs may be reached via e-mail at jacobs@corsicanadailysun.com. Want to “Soundoff” on this story? E-mail: soundoff@corsicanadailysun.com.