Water and wastewater projects: stimulus money funds needed projects.

• Author: Kalytiak, Tracy
• Position: ENVIRONMENTAL - American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

Carter Cole had just arrived home after a Palmer city council meeting in 2008 when he received an urgent phone call. A water main had burst under a street in the heart of town.

"It came right through the road," said Cole, the city's public works director. "It was flooding the streets. There was a hole the size of a truck we ended up losing. We had to close Alaska Street because it was too dangerous to let people drive through it."

Twenty feet of aging steel pipe had rusted and literally popped open at its seam. The city lost 300,000 gallons of water in one hour and then other water mains began failing. Something had to be done immediately, but buying and installing steel pipe wasn't going to be a cheap fix.

Fortunately, Palmer received a portion of $40 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act money that was being used to move forward nearly 50 drinking water and wastewater improvement projects in the state.

"I don't know what we would have done without that stimulus money," Cole said. "I don't think the city financially could have done it.

Palmer received the largest amounts: $2.5 million for fixing its water mains and another $2.5 million to bring its wastewater treatment plant into compliance with Environmental Protection Agency permit dictates.

ACCELERATED WATER PROJECTS

Other communities receiving stimulus help for their wastewater and water treatment projects include Craig, Dillingham, Fairbanks North Star Borough, Haines, Homer, Kenai, Ketchikan, Mat-Su Borough, North Pole, Seward, Sitka, Skagway, Soldotna, Wasilla and Wrangell, according to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

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The stimulus money is being dispensed as low-interest loans, some with subsidies requiring only 10 percent or less of the original loan to be repaid.

These communities need the help because they don't qualify for the same financial assistance many villages in rural Alaska receive for wastewater and water quality-improvement projects, said Bill Griffith, facility programs manager for DEC.

"These communities are middle-size communities that got a lot of the stimulus money through the municipal grant and loan program," Griffith said. "Medium-size communities in Alaska actually are too big to qualify for the Village Safe Water Program, even though people in Anchorage think of them as rural communities."

The stimulus money accelerated a number of shovel-ready or ongoing projects that otherwise would not be funded.

"Now...