County Commissioners address wastewater plans, EMS concerns

With all members present, the Lincoln County Board of Commissioners met Tuesday, Nov. 4 in the Lincoln County Boardroom.

Chairwoman Tiffani Landeen opened the meeting with a presentation from South Lincoln Rural Water on Regional Wastewater efforts with possible board support. Managing partner of Teton Ridge Consulting, Steve Watson and General Manager of South Lincoln Rural Water, John Sterns, were present to give information on the project. 

“As county commissioners, you understand fully the importance of essential public infrastructure to a functioning society. You hear a lot about roads, water, and electricity. I’m here to say that water, wastewater, and storm water systems are equally as important and like other public infrastructure, it requires ongoing maintenance and investment to keep it fully operational,” Watson said. 

Watson believes state and federal requirements, increased intensity of storm events, and population density are driving wastewater improvements in the region. 

“Bigger systems, better technology to address these regulatory requirements, more staff, more staff training, all add up and they are significant costs that are hard to address for small communities in particular,” he said. 

Watson and Sterns are working in collaboration with Worthing, Canton, Beresford, and Lennox to look at the needs of each community. 

“What came from that was a 3.1 million gallon per day mechanical wastewater treatment facility that would be best sited in Canton,” Sterns said. 

Canton was chosen due to its proximity to the Big Sioux River and the need for an adequate discharge location. The group has not developed a timeline for construction as they are focusing their efforts on funding and support for the project. 

“Our engineering firm came up with a top line cost of $108 million for the full buildout of the project. That number is without a doubt, expensive and from there, Steve and I have worked towards trying to find the proper funding sources to make this a more feasible option,” Sterns said.  

The team is currently working through three funding pathways to get the project completed. 

“There is a readiness path where there’s dollars available for project planning. There’s an implementation path that is for medium-sized projects that include both planning and construction dollars. Then there is an industry transformation pathway that can provide up to $50 million towards project costs. And so it’s our intent to pursue the funding opportunity as we’d like to pursue the readiness path initially that will allow us to do some additional project planning,” Watson said. 

Watson reported they have received letters of support to pursue grant applications from Canton, Worthing, Lennox, and Beresford and because it is a nationally competitive grant, the team strongly feels it would be helpful to have both the county and the state on board with their coalition. 

“We’re not making any type of funding request of the county, we’re simply asking you to consider providing a letter of support of this coalition and our endeavor to pursue this unique federal grant opportunity,” Watson continued. 

A motion to approve the letter of support made by Jim Schmidt, seconded by Joel Arends, motion carried unanimously. 

Highway Superintendent, Terry Fluit asked the commission to consider a motion to authorize the chair to sign a resolution to modify the County Highway system. 

“Back in 2021 we came to an agreement with the City of Tea to take over two miles of road around their municipality up there. This is the resolution the Department of Transportation will need to remove these roads from our system,” Fluit said. 

Motion to approve the resolution by Arends, seconded by Betty Otten, motion carried.

Commissioner Schmidt and Commissioner Arends requested board discussion and possible action to establish a committee to study and make recommendations to the County Commission on Emergency Medical Services Districts. 

“This was brought to tour attention after an article appeared in the Lennox Independent regarding the city subsidizing the ambulance area that Lennox covers and I think it’s to the tune of about $120,000. So after all these years, the citizens of Lennox and their city council decided that they could no longer support that, so they sent out a notice that after a certain date they were going to discontinue ambulance service beyond city limits. This certainly facilitated a lot of calls on the part of individuals and concerns and given the situation that there was a meeting prior to this several years ago which were met with a lot of objections,” Commissioner Schmidt said. 

Commissioner Arends asked for three things to be approved at the meeting. 

“I’d like to get all the stakeholders in Lincoln County at the table. I want to get them as well as the commissioners educated on how ambulance taxation districts work, I want to better understand the financial controls that ambulance services use in order to pay for the service and we want to look at those boundary lines as well so if there is a service in Tea and Harrisburg that they’ve got an area carved out for them,” he said. 

Commissioner Schmidt asked for Commissioner Otten and Doug Putnam’s reaction to the proposal. 

“I would like to make a motion to table this because this was just dropped on the agenda with no information and I remember the discussion a couple years ago, and I’m speechless actually that we didn’t know about this ahead of time,” Commissioner Otten responded. 

Chairwoman Landeen asked for public comment on the motion to table the discussion. Linda Montgomery stood to speak.

“I totally support getting a committee together to discuss this. I know that this agenda came out on Friday and I’ve been trying to find answers to many things on this agenda since Friday. So, I don’t think that I can sit here and believe that people haven’t been informed. All it would have taken is a call to the two that presented this and put it on the agenda. I believe that a citizens committee is what we are all about,” she said. 

Amanda Mack of the City of Harrisburg and Justin Weiland of Tea both asked to be present for further conversations for their respective towns. Schmidt made a motion to table the conversation for one month. Commissioner Otten made a secondary motion to table the conversation for two months pending the Tea study, seconded by Schmidt, motion carried.

Building Superintendent, John Rombough asked the commission to consider a motion to approve the budgeted EECBG lighting upgrade project and award the contract to Electric Construction Company who placed the low bid at $160,182. 

“We’ve been talking about this project for about two years now, to replace the fluorescent lighting to LED lighting. We have a grant that was presented to us for $75,000 roughly to do the project and so I opted to do all the lighting in this part of the building, nothing in the old courthouse. In my budget you authorized $190,000 to do it,” he said. Motion to approve by Schmidt, seconded by Arends, motion carried.

Chief Civil Deputy State’s Attorney, Drew DeGroot requested board discussion and possible adoption of the Board of Commissioner Rules of Procedure. 

“At the end of last year I brought this forward, I don’t like suggesting changes mid-year so we waited until the end of the year now,” he said. 

Calendar changes and the adoption of alcohol fees and licensing would be added to the procedure and adding uniform meeting times to the procedure. Chairwoman Landeen instructed DeGroot to make corrections to the documents and add it to the next meeting’s agenda.