Anybody got 5 million dollars?

PALMER - Development of the city of Palmer's deal to extend water and sewer services to the new Mat-Su Regional Medical Center has hit a bump.

"We've got a $5-million hole to fill in," Palmer City Council Member Tony Pippel said.

About $1.2 million of the hole lies in the pipe design. The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation requires a five-foot separation between sewer and water lines, which puts the pipes in two separate trenches, to prevent water contamination.

In the 1930s, when the code was written, piping was unavoidably leaky, said Rick Koch, Palmer public works director and utility extension project leader. The city's more modern design calls for seamless pipe that's ultra-reliable, he said.

"We have a quality-control system that provides for zero leaks," Koch said.

DEC policy states that if the public health is safeguarded, they will issue permits for a project. Palmer engineers said the city's proposal satisfies this requirement, and deserves the permit.

But DEC doesn't think the design is so safe, and points out it has already chopped the usual 10-foot separation requirement by half.

"It's not our intent to break the bank on this," said Kristin Ryan, director of the division of environmental health.

She said it's possible to have a safe one-trench design with a 5-foot separation between pipes, but that a 3-foot separation was just too little - not simply regarding adherence to regulation, but out of concern for public safety.

"We don't feel it's prudent to go any less than that," she said.

Ryan also said DEC regulations are based on current technology.

Is there a precedent?

There is an Alaska precedent for the city's proposal, Koch said. A North Slope project constructed pipe in one trench with a 3-foot separation. There have been no failures to the system.

But Ryan said the projects weren't so comparable.

"It was in permafrost. If there was any rupturing," she said, which was unlikely, "any material would instantly freeze. There would be no cross-connection between the sewer and the water line."

The North Slope project was double-piped, unlike the Palmer proposal. It was in an area low in seismic activity, unlike Palmer. And according to Allan Nakanishi, DEC environmental engineer in Wasilla, the North Slope project also had a flow rate at least an order of magnitude less than that proposed for Palmer.

City attorney Jack Snodgrass pointed out that although the system has been allowed on a case-by-case basis, no other state has set a precedent allowing 3-foot trenches in its code.

"They may be wrong, but there's a whole gob of them that are wrong," he said.

He suggested the city could back its case with information from the pipe's manufacturer proving its safety.

The city has appealed the waiver at a higher level within DEC. However, Koch said an appeal to the top would likely take about a year.

Project engineers were flummoxed at DEC's intransigence. "It's sort of like being in a pitch-black room without a light switch," Koch said.

Making up the difference

Palmer's original bid for the project, based on a one-trench, 3-foot-separation design, put the total cost at almost $9 million. The U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed to back 75 percent of that figure. The revised bid from Public Works is $14.1 million, according to a letter to Koch and City Manager Tom Healy rom Scott Hattenburg, principal engineer on the project.

Aside from DEC's requirements, the increase in the estimate sprouted from several reroutes of the line around "adversarial" property owners, reroutes to satisfy the Alaska Railroad, hospital connection and University of Alaska requirements, increases in easement acquisition costs from inflation, mitigations in the Kepler-Bradley state park to satisfy Department of Natural Resources requirements and a 15-percent increase in pipe material costs since September 2004.

The three options for additional funding are state government, federal government and the hospital itself. City council elected to pursue all of these.

Another design option - running only the sewer and not the water line - was roundly rejected by council and project engineers, as it would renege on commitments made to property owners along the line's path.

"That's a very short-sighted Band-Aid to a hemorrhage," Koch said.

Kate Golden can be reached at 352-2284 or kate.golden@frontiersman.com.