New well to provide safe water for Glorieta

May 8—Roughly 70 households in Glorieta will soon enjoy water from a new well intended to provide the community with a safe, reliable and drought-resilient water source.

A one-year process to construct the nearly 1,000-foot well in the small community near Pecos was recently finished, and "it's ready to go online in the very near future," said Trent Botkin, board president of the Greater Glorieta Community Mutual Domestic Water Consumers Association. The association, a volunteer-run public water utility, serves a total of 105 households, or an estimated 300 people, he said.

The $2.4 million project has been in the works for over 10 years.

Around 2011, the discovery of unsafe levels of the cancer-causing, radioactive metal radium in a well serving residents of Glorieta Estates spurred an "emergency" effort to regionalize what was then three separate community water systems — Glorieta Estates, the village of Glorieta and Glorieta East — into one Greater Glorieta utility, Botkin said.

The utility shut down the radium-contaminated well and, by 2014, served both Glorieta Estates and the village using the village's well.

That approximately 500-foot well, however, "was never intended to support this large of a population," Botkin said. Thus, community leaders set in motion plans to dig a deeper well near the existing one.

The new well, completed in April, draws from a portion of the aquifer with high water quality, said Chris Wolf, a senior hydrogeologist at the Albuquerque-based environmental consulting company Daniel B. Stephens and Associates.

The well long ago capped due to radium contamination had tested at 7 picocuries per liter of radium, slightly over the federal Environmental Protection Agency's safe standard of 5 picocuries per liter, Wolf said. A curie is a unit of radioactivity; a picocurie is one trillionth of a curie. Water from the new well has tested at 0.5 picocuries per liter for radium, or "very, very low compared to the standard," he said.

That doesn't mean, however, the utility is out of the woods for ensuring safe water for customers.

It still needs to replace "really old, decrepit" distribution lines in Glorieta East, which have led to repeated water quality violations in recent years, Botkin said.

In 2019 and 2021, water samples in Glorieta East tested at 60 and then 21 parts per billion for lead, both above the 15 parts per billion level at which the EPA requires water systems to lower contamination, according to publicly available reports from the utility. The utility received a violation for failing to test for lead in 2018. Most recently, in 2022, tests showed lead contamination of only 3.5 parts per billion, below the level at which the EPA requires remediation.

The water association, with help from Santa Fe County, originally secured enough funding to build the new well and replace the aging water pipes simultaneously.

County staff secured $1.1 million in federal Community Development Block Grant funds for the project in 2019, while the Greater Glorieta water association board secured an additional $787,000 from the Water Trust Board — a board overseen by the New Mexico Finance Authority, created by the state Legislature — and $487,000 from two capital outlay allocations from the Legislature, county capital planner Maxx Hendren said.

However, as complications and bureaucracy delayed the project, construction expenses escalated during the pandemic, which left the Greater Glorieta utility with only enough money to build a new well, Botkin and Hendren said.

"The engineers are very confident this [new well] is going to be a long-term, high-quality water supply" for the Greater Glorieta association, but "there's still work to do," Hendren said.

The good news: The association has been approved to receive $1.1 million from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund to replace deteriorating water lines and is waiting to finalize the grant paperwork, Botkin said.

He also cast the association's ability to construct a new well as a "crazy" accomplishment for the small, volunteer-run community water utility.

While the Biden administration has allocated federal funds to support water infrastructure across the country, "the very challenging part for local water systems is going through the really extensive administrative and financial process to obtain these grants," he said.

"If you look at the list for who got the funds over the past several allocations, it's Las Cruces, Albuquerque, Farmington, Grants and Greater Glorieta, so which one of those doesn't fit? We have figured out how to compete with the big dogs," he said. "There [are] always more projects, but ... a lot of these things have been on the books for a long time, so I'm really happy to see us actually getting some boxes checked and projects complete."