May 25—Water rates in the city of Santa Fe could rise for the first time in over a decade due to an anticipated need of more than $100 million in improvements to the water system.
Officials in the Water Division say projects planned in the next several years are crucial to protect critical infrastructure and make Santa Fe’s long-term water future more secure.
“For the amount of work that we’re trying to do on rehabilitating old infrastructure and adding new water resiliency-related infrastructure over the next few years, we’re starting to see pressure to increase rates in order to be able to to pay for those projects,” Water Division Director Jesse Roach said.
Any rate hikes would have to be approved by the City Council, Roach noted.
The division is projecting an initial 3% rate increase that would take effect around July 2025, with additional increases in future years, Roach wrote in an email. The hike would be the first since 2013.
Roach said the division is currently working with a financial consultant on projections and hopes to deliver a presentation to the City Council by late June, when the fiscal year ends.
Roach gave Santa Fe residents a deep dive into the city’s water outlook with an April presentation called “What’s Up With Water.” The 2023 annual report on the city’s water supply also was published recently on the city’s website. Both detailed some of the upcoming work.
The city is now working on four separate water infrastructure projects that will be completed in the next five years, all with significant price tags:
* A conduit rebuild for the Nichols Dam outlet for $19 million.
* A conduit rebuild for the McClure Dam outlet for $21 million.
* Upgrades to the Canyon Road Water Treatment Plant for $15 million.
* Construction on the San Juan-Chama return flow project — a 17-mile pipeline sending effluent from the wastewater treatment plant on Paseo Real to the Rio Grande at the Buckman Direct Diversion — for $50 million.
The pipeline, which would allow the city to accumulate San Juan-Chama Project water credits to build a future backup supply, was estimated to cost around $20 million a few years ago.
Roach said inflation and increased construction costs over the past several years have driven up the price tags of some of the projects since their inception, “to the point where we’re seeing estimates for projects that are double what we expected three to five years ago.”
None of the projects include any of the work being done on the city’s wastewater treatment plant, which has struggled with a series of breakdowns putting it out of compliance with state and federal discharge permits.
The city Wastewater Management Division is pursuing a total of $8 million in contracts through the emergency procurement process to get the plant back into compliance, and a consultant is working on a study expected to be presented to the City Council later this year on long-term options.
At Thursday’s State of the City address, Mayor Alan Webber said the city is working with the consultant on potential ways to “fast-track” the study.
“We have some intermediate measures in place … but we want to move more aggressively than that,” Webber said in an interview Thursday.
Constructing a new wastewater treatment plant would likely run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, dwarfing the work currently underway on the city’s water infrastructure.
Some of that work was happening Tuesday at the Canyon Road Water Treatment Plant, where contractors from CF Padilla LLC were busy building a new valve vault.
The Canyon Road plant currently treats 5 million gallons of water per day, or about half of the city’s total daily supply.
Jonathan Montoya, the Water Division’s source of supply operations manager, said the water that comes from municipal reservoirs to the Canyon Road plant is both the cleanest and cheapest water supply for Santa Fe.
Because the reservoirs are upstream of the plant in the Santa Fe Municipal Watershed, “it’s all gravity,” he said.
Still, the plant is a high-tech operation that has the capacity to monitor all of the city’s water sources in real time.
The plant’s output is monitored even more carefully than usual now because the city needs to fully drain Nichols Reservoir by the end of July. It is preparing for work to correct flaws in the earthen dam structure and make upgrades to the outlet conduit, which is scheduled to begin in August.
For safety reasons, the water level of the reservoir can’t be lowered more than 1 foot per day, so “we’ve been monitoring it like crazy,” Montoya said.
After work is complete on the Nichols Dam, which city officials hope will be ready in time for the 2025 spring runoff, work will then begin on the much larger McClure Dam upstream.
The sedimentation and flocculation basins at the Canyon Road plant, which Montoya described as “giant Brita filters,” are also being replaced for the first time in 21 years. The basins remove contaminants from the water, which is also treated with chlorine at the plant in a massive 2 million-gallon underground tank.
Montoya said all of the work being done on the plant, the reservoirs and other parts of the water system will help ensure the city’s dams are structurally sound for decades to come and that the city can continue to treat water to a high standard as regulations continue to become more stringent.
“This is long overdue, for sure,” he said.