New owners of the Lakeside Mobile Home Park have promised to fix and improve the park’s ailing sewer system, which has been in violation of state health standards since 1997.

In a July 5 letter to the Montezuma County Commissioners, Lakeside manager Drew Cleland said that it is the intention of the owners to begin construction of the improved system by the fall "so that a fully operating system is in place to handle sewage flows this winter."

Last February, Greg Brand, an inspector with the Colorado Department of Health and Environment, issued a notice of violation and a cease-and-desist order for the park, which is home to some 50 families.

The order came after former owner Tom Norton did not comply with the health department’s clean-up request in December 1999, after health inspectors found two unlined, unpermitted sewage lagoons and high levels of fecal-coliform bacteria draining into McElmo Creek.

The park has since been purchased by DLMT, LLC, which has made some preliminary improvements, but not enough to comply with the health department’s standards on waste treatment. More action is planned for the near future, according to Cleland.

He stated that plans for an improved disposal system are being drawn up by Johnson Engineering and will be submitted to the state in six to eight weeks. Once the site plan is approved by the state health department, construction will begin, the letter states, with more immediate problems being dealt with earlier if authorization can be gained to do so from state health authorities before approval of the new plant.

Those improvements include a pump-station renovation, and the construction of a new lagoon system to handle waste water from some 60 trailers. An additional lagoon is necessary to store waste effluent "so that the remaining lagoons can be sequentially drained, renovated, lined and put back into service," according to the letter.

That construction could begin by as early as August.

At their Monday meeting the commissioners expressed frustration at the slow-moving process for improvement at the park, a situation that they have little control over. Lakeside’s sanitation system is regulated by the state because it produces more than 2,000 gallons of waste discharge per day. The county has enforcement control of individual septics, but not those developments that are more than the 2,000-gallon limit.

"It seems like these problems that the state has jurisdiction over always fall back on the county when people want something done," said Commissioner Gene Story. "There need to be things addressed in the legislature on who has authority under the statutes regarding septic systems.

"With the state, things seem to fall through the cracks quickly, where they can linger for years in that very large bureaucracy."