Special districts are a world unto themselves, and the politics of running them can be extremely complex. Few people attend their board meetings, which are composed of a few very important decisions and a multitude of the small details that keep a district in operation, day in and day out. The volunteers who serve on the boards give countless hours of their time and generally strive to do the best they can without much input from the populace ... until something doesn’t work quite as planned. Then everyone has an opinion.

The Cortez Sanitation District is in a bind right now. New wastewater treatment capacity needs to be developed to support growth; there’s no debating that. The question on many people’s minds is why we didn’t see this coming, but the important question is how we — yes, we — are going to fund the improvements.

We have to do it. A sewer system is very easy to take for granted. The water goes down the drain, and that’s the last we see of it. Every three months we receive a bill, and although it may seem a little steep for treating the amount of wastewater most of us believe we generate, it sure beats having a septic tank. There’s a lot to be said for having someone else take responsibility for sewage.

But what if that option weren’t available? What if people began moving to Cortez, ready to build homes, ready to construct businesses and employ locals, and they couldn’t because sewer taps weren’t available?

The state and federal governments strictly regulate the treatment and discharge of effluent, and rightly so. Although Colorado rests on the spine of the continent, most of us still must live downstream from someone. If they discharge raw sewage into our drinking water, that’s bad, and if everyone in a watershed does it, that’s disastrous. That’s why planned development is so important.

The sanitation district is a public entity, run by officials elected by the public to run it on our behalf. We need to provide input about how we want that done, recognizing we don’t have the expertise to handle the day-to-day management but that we’re responsible for providing the vision to direct the growth of the district.

That vision needs to encompass the next decade, at least. We can’t add wastewater treatment capacity and infrastructure in a patchwork fashion; we need a comprehensive design. That doesn’t mean it can’t be built in phases, as needed; it means that we need to decide now how we’re going to proceed depending on various rates of growth and development.