‘The Sewer Lady’

PALMER — Once upon a time, Helen Munoz stood at 4-foot-10. She says she doesn’t stand quite so tall anymore, but don’t tell that to the countless politicians and businesspeople who’ve stood in her way in the 44 years she’s lived up on Lazy Mountain.

With a scowl and stare that could singe right through a man with twice her size and supposed expertise, Munoz balances her intensity with a sardonic, self-effacing wit that’s helped her remain vital and engaged with the big issues facing her community well into her 80s.

Still living on her 80 acres, which include a bed and breakfast and a garage, her causes over the years have included better hospice care in the Valley and AIDS awareness and financial literacy in the school system. But her raison d’etre has been the same since the day she and her husband Larry arrived 44 years ago and opened their business A1 Cesspools: seeing the implementation of a sewer system in the Mat-Su Borough outside of Wasilla and Palmer proper.

“I’ve lived too long and I haven’t shut up and I ain’t dying until it’s done,” Munoz said. “It better get done.”

The next month figures to be an important one in the progress of her cause. Starting with last night’s meeting, the Mat-Su Borough Assembly is hearing testimony on the need for and viability of a borough-wide sewer system, which ultimately would take an estimated $22 million to get off the ground.

On Oct. 4, voters in Palmer will get a chance to have their say on a citywide proposition that would allow the city to spend $5 million on improving its wastewater system, and last week, Alaska Gov. Bill Walker phoned Muñoz to get her thoughts on the matter.

Munoz said she heard she was referred to by the governor as “The Sewer Lady,” a moniker she wears proudly.

“I get a kick out of it,” she said. “A lot of women my age would be insulted, but I consider it a compliment. It shows I’m not sitting on my duff doing nothing, and (this cause) ain’t for me, so I don’t think I’m going to give up till I draw my last breath.”

Walker, for his part, found the 85-year-old most refreshing.

“I love people with passion and she has a lot of passion on that issue,” Walker said. “It’s in the works to get a facility in the Valley… It doesn’t happen in a year, but we’re on the right track to getting it resolved.”

Munoz first came to Alaska in 1967, six years after her brother Bill moved to the Valley from Armonk, N.Y.

Making the trip out once a year to see Bill, Helen and Larry finally decided it would be cheaper to simply make their next drive their last, moving to Palmer in 1972 and acquiring land up on Lazy Mountain shortly thereafter.

Larry worked the pump truck for A-1 Cesspool septic service and Helen handled the office affairs and bookkeeping.

That was until 1993 when the two divorced. Larry, Helen said, had fallen in love with a mutual friend of theirs whose husband had just died, prompting a deep sympathetic relationship between them.

“I saw him stand at this door and cry the day he left. I didn’t kick him out. He lived here a month after the divorce,” Helen recalled, sitting in her kitchen. “I’d known him since I was 11 and he was awfully good to my mom — he carried her downstairs the night she died… so I can’t hate him.”

Single again at age 62, Helen didn’t see herself marrying again.

“I don’t look like a swan, but swans mate once in a lifetime,” she said. “Maybe it’s a selfish way of looking at it, but when you’re 62 and get a divorce, one person is going to end up looking after the other.”

She put that energy into opening a bed and breakfast, a successful venture that occupied much of her time until a few years later when her son Stephen, who had moved out to Los Angeles to become an agent, died from AIDS. That loss, coupled with the loss of another of her four sons, this one having died of colon cancer, turned her attention toward improving Hospice care in the Valley, as well as becoming an advocate for AIDS awareness in schools.

“Back in 1995 Stephen looked across the room at me and said, ‘hey Ma, you got a big mouth, go back to Palmer and talk to the kids in schools about AIDS,” Helen recalled. “I didn’t answer him right away… but his answer was, ‘if you can reach one kid, it’s worth the effort.’ So I came back to Palmer, talked to Darlene Reed (Public Health Nurse) and went into every school.”

Finding success on both fronts, Helen turned her attention back to the issue that, left unattended, she believed would one day degenerate into a catastrophe for the Mat-Su Valley.

“In Anchorage, there’s no room to expand — that’s why it’s growing out here and so why can’t we take care of our own s—t, literally,” Muñoz said. “If you’re hauling septic from Talkeetna that’s 200 miles, round-trip. And now you can’t dig clams down in the clam gulch anymore. When I first got here you could eat them, you can’t now. They tell me it’s red tide. That’s a bunch of B.S.”

Munoz believes the biggest barriers to a borough-wide sewer has been short-sighted politicians and misusing resources when they do become available.

“With that $5 million, if I see them do one more study without putting something in the ground… you know what? I don’t have too much respect for engineers. I’ve seen more money spent on studies to paper the inside of this house and nothing is produced,” she said. “How much clean water is left on this planet? I could care less whether there’s water on Mars; there’s not much clean water here and we don’t know what to do with sewer?”