Sanitation

Sanitation-district board downsizes proposed building

Dec. 22, 2001

By Gail Binkly
Journal Managing Editor

The Cortez Sanitation District board agreed Tuesday night to scale down the size of a new administration building scheduled to be built along with a new sewer plant south of Cortez.

According to board chair Bob Diederich, the board downsized the building — which had been planned at 5,700 square feet and $1 million — to a more modest 2,400-square-foot building with an estimated cost of $250,000 to $300,000.

"We have to talk to our architects, but we definitely think it can be done for around that," Diederich said.

In May 2000, Cortez Sanitation District voters approved a mill-levy increase to pay for a $10 million sewer plant near the district’s existing southwest plant. Construction on the new plant is expected to begin next spring or summer.

In downsizing the building, the district decided to eliminate a large board room that had been planned by the previous district administration. It would have been big enough to handle an audience of 25 as well as the board itself.

"There was a designed break room and we continued with that," Diederich said. "We’ll use that for our board meetings. It will be a little bit larger than our present (meeting room)."

The board also shrank the planned men’s and women’s changing rooms. Those rooms, which are for sanitation employees to change out of dirty clothes, had been designed to be "pretty huge," Diederich said.

"We cut down on the size of those considerably. Those were the primary areas we cut," he said.

The board members had expressed dismay over the size of the planned administration building at a Nov. 27 meeting with the project’s engineers, members of Arber & Associates, a Denver-based firm.

The board is struggling to re-evaluate plans and policies that had been made by the previous board. Three of the five members are new, having been elected Nov. 6 in a recall election that removed three incumbents.

The construction costs for the proposed new sewer plant, originally estimated at $8.9 million, had risen to $10.8 million, the engineers explained at the Nov. 27 meeting.

Part of the increase was for 4 percent inflation and other costs incurred as a result of a year’s delay in starting the project, but the biggest increase was for the administration building.

Originally planned as a small, $150,000 facility, it had been greatly expanded after district officials said they needed more room. The expansion added $900,000 to the cost of the project, the engineers said.

The sanitation district’s current administration building is just 1,100 square feet, Diederich said.

The new one will include offices for the district manager and superintendent, men’s and women’s restrooms and showers, a laundry room, break rooms and computer rooms.

The changing rooms, showers and laundry facilities are necessary because it is a health issue if employees who work in the sewer plant take their clothes home to wash them, according to Jay Conner, the district’s interim manager.

Diederich said, so far, the board has managed to whittle the estimated cost of the new sewer plant’s construction down to $10.2 million.

"We think we can get it to $10 million or below," he said. "We have to. We don’t have any choice."

Also on Tuesday, the board voted to immediately begin putting $2,000 out of every $4,000 tap fee into a separate fund to help play for future expansion.

When tap fees were raised to $4,000 by the previous board, the intent was that the extra amount would be allocated for expanding the sanitation district’s facilities.

Diederich and G.W. McCutcheon, the two incumbents left on the board, expressed surprise recently when they learned that the money was not being separated out.

"The previous board had stated they were raising the tap fees and this money would be used for future construction. We felt we needed to follow through and start earmarking the money rather than it disappearing into the general fund like it has in the past," Diederich said.

He said $113,000 that should have been put into the separate account since the tap fee was raised will be moved into it now.