Water project gone awry
The Opinion of The Pinnacle
Sometimes events are just so tragic that there’s no pleasure to
be found in saying
”
I told you so.
”
Water project gone awry
The Opinion of The Pinnacle
Sometimes events are just so tragic that there’s no pleasure to be found in saying “I told you so.”
Sometimes events are just so tragic that there’s no pleasure to be found in saying “I told you so.”
That’s never been truer than in the sad saga of San Juan Bautista’s water project.
For more than a year, the Pinnacle has been reporting that a $3.8 million grant from the federal Economic Development Administration was in jeopardy.
Nearly every news account brought hot denials from San Juan officials. But this week, the loss of the federal grant – the lynchpin in the city’s $10 million project – was confirmed.
Without it, completing the project will mean economically crippling water rates in the small town for many years to come.
The project can hardly be deemed frivolous. Parts of the town’s water system date back to the Gold Rush era, complete with redwood pipes. Leaks are commonplace. Former City Manager Larry Cain was occasionally seen tending to the crumbling system himself. Many, if not most, residents of the town would not consider drinking their tap water.
The EDA laid blame for withdrawal of the grant at the feet of city officials, and went on to say in a letter that funds still would be available, but only if the San Benito County Water District is running the show. As EDA staff tell it, San Juan did not document adequate progress on the project. Meetings with San Juan officials produced little more than their assertions that the blame lies with an intractable San Benito County Water District.
San Juan City Manager Jan McClintock – who took the job long after San Juan’s ham-fisted handling of the project had it unraveling – promises to seek out other funding sources. Everyone in City Hall promises one thing: the project is not dead yet. McClintock is reportedly repealing EDA’s decision.
That’s certainly welcome news. The people living and working in San Juan certainly deserve better than Third World levels of service.
But even so, the events surrounding withdrawal of the grant leave some troubling questions.
McClintock and Councilman George Dias confirmed that they conspired with Mayor Priscilla Hill to withhold news of the grant being pulled from the public and the majority of the council for more than a week. That’s wrong, plain and simple. To be fair, the news was delivered in a letter addressed to the mayor and not to the other council members or the city manager. And it was the mayor who reportedly told Dias and McClintock to keep mum. The city manager works for the council, so she can hardly be blamed for doing what she was told to do. Mayor Hill has long taken misguided pride in not cooperating with most media. She apparently refuses to understand that it is through local media that she can best reach her constituents. But picking and choosing who is privy to such weighty developments is completely divorced from the transparency our government process demands.
Lack of transparency has plagued efforts to keep the project on track in the past. A delegation visited the EDA office in Seattle last year, but plans for the visit were not made public.
Project consultant Mark Davis, who is paid more than $6,000 a month to oversee the project, has not been required to submit itemized invoices to the city detailing his activities and time spent. That’s not Davis’ fault, but in a town as small as San Juan, with a staff and budget as small as San Juan’s, responsible stewardship demands the city council do more than write more than $70,000 a year in blank checks.
And that is what this whole sad turn of events comes down to: accountability.
So we won’t say “I told you so.” But we will say that we all deserve an accounting of how it came to be that San Juan turned its back on $3.8 million.
