Lower Valley water asks voters approve $35 million bond to provide first-time sewer service

About 300 households in El Paso’s Lower Valley will be able to ditch their septic systems and receive sewer service for the first time if voters next month OK a $35 million bond by the Lower Valley Water District.

The bond election date is May 4, and early voting runs from April 22 to April 30.

The Lower Valley water utility provides water to over 21,000 homes and businesses and sewer service to more than 18,000 in the area generally southeast of Loop 375, from the towns of Socorro and Sparks south to Clint.

Many colonia neighborhoods sprouted up in the area before the Lower Valley Water District was established and before El Paso County imposed development codes. Neighborhoods that were once far-flung, rural communities now sit amid both crop fields and high-end, newly built housing developments – but they lack basic wastewater infrastructure and largely rely on septic systems that leech waste across their properties.

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The Lower Valley Water District is asking voters within its service area to approve $35 million in debt so the utility has enough cash to construct sewer lines in five different neighborhoods. The last time the utility held a bond election was in 2019, when voters allowed it to sell bonds worth $25 million.

“This time around, due to our financial stability, our financial advisor estimated that we can go ahead and go out for $35 million,” Michael Flores, the utility’s contracts and grants administrator, told El Paso Matters.

The utility estimated the bond issuance would boost a homeowner’s annual tax bill by a maximum of $32 per $100,000 of taxable value. Only property owners in the district’s boundaries would pay the tax.

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El Paso County Colonias lack water, sewer

A 2018 study conducted by a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso found over 67,000 Texas residents were living in nearly 500 unserved colonias, which the study defined as communities lacking water, sewer and power infrastructure and paved roads.

Within El Paso County, 32,000 people had no sewer service, according to the study. The researchers focused on the Bejar Estates colonia in Socorro and documented residents’ old, malfunctioning septic systems and relatively higher rates of bleeding ulcers and intestinal ailments.

“Complaints of residents regarding odors and other septic drainfield-related nuisances have been reduced where sewer service has been provided,” the 2018 study read, “whereas in neighborhoods without sewer service, such as Bejar Estates, these complaints have continued and even grown as the septic tank drainfields age beyond 20 years.”

The Lower Valley Water District earlier this year began construction to provide wastewater service to Bejar Estates using almost $7 million in federal funding.

“Septic tanks work really well if you live in an area where your groundwater is 500 feet or 1,000 feet (deep), where you’re not contaminating the groundwater,” said Ed Long, chief operations and technical officer for LVWD. The groundwater table in the Lower Valley, however, is between 5 feet and 8 feet below the surface, he said.

“If you’ve got areas where you have clay, or a lot of organic material, that water is not going to percolate into the ground,” Long said. “Some of it is going to start coming up if you’ve saturated the soil.”

What will the Lower Valley Water District bond cover?

The Lower Valley Water District recently identified 69 water and sewer projects that need to get done, and estimated all of those would cost about $93 million to complete. But the utility chose eight of the larger projects on its list to prioritize for this bond election. The neighborhoods that would receive new sewer lines are Wildhorse, Athena West North, Valle Bonito, Hacienda Real and Mesa Verde.

“If we can get a bond issuance for these bigger projects, in-house we can fund the smaller ones,” said Gerry Grijalva, the utility’s general manager.

Seven of the eight proposed bond projects are sewer-related. The biggest one is a $7.5 million project to build a lift station off of North Loop Drive. Lift stations drive the sewage system by pumping wastewater up several feet so that it can flow downward to the next lift station, until the sewage reaches El Paso Water’s Bustamante Wastewater Treatment Plant on Pan American Drive.

“We have 16 lift stations right now in our district,” Long said. “So you’re going from a shallow manhole to a real deep manhole, and pumping it back up. And the process just keeps on going.”

The Lower Valley Water District buys all of its water supplies from El Paso Water, and last year paid about $6 million for over 2 billion gallons.

If voters approve the bond issuance, LVWD would pay a 5.5% interest rate that will mean the total cost of the bond – including principal and interest – will reach nearly $72 million over 30 years.

The utility held about $25 million in cash as of the end of last September, with $277 million in assets versus liabilities of $45 million. LVWD has also seen a steady increase in new customers as El Paso’s population has shifted to the eastern parts of the county in recent years.

“We do take advantage of the new development to be able to extend our existing system,” Long said.

LVWD owed $37.2 million in long-term debt as of Sept. 30, a decrease from $40 million a year earlier and $42 million in 2021.

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The Lower Valley Water District’s customers saw their bills rise sharply last year in response to a rate increase imposed by El Paso Water.

The average household water and sewer bill among LVWD customers was $69 per month last year, an increase from $60 in 2022. El Paso Water customers on average are paying about $73 per month for water and sewer bills after the utility’s rate hike earlier this year. Those figures don’t count either utility’s trash collection or stormwater fees.

This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: Lower Valley Water District seeks $35 million for colonias