You know the saying about stuff that rolls downhill.

You know what else rolls downhill? Water. Lots of it, and fast.

I thought that this morning as I stepped over puddles that would have been ponds if it kept raining outside the El Paso Water Utilities headquarters, where the Public Service Board, which oversees the utility, was having its meeting.

I was interested in three agenda items that related to the stormwater utility. The items were for presentations on a stormwater master plan, which is under development, a public participation process, and the preliminary list of groups that would be invited to form an advisory committee for the stormwater master plan.

What was particularly interesting was the idea that the stormwater master plan is not completed. In fact, it was not begun until January, and it is scheduled for completion in January, 2009.

I believe that is at the root of much of the problem with people's acceptance of the utility. It's not just that folks got a bill in the mail. It was that, aside from lingering memories of "Storm 2006," they didn't exactly know what it was for. And nobody was able to tell them exactly what it was for, other than that El Paso has a problem with drainage in general, and flooding, in particular.

It was bad timing for them to send out bills in the dry month of April, when people also were receiving appraisal notices and generally in a bad mood about taxes (although when are people ever in a good mood about taxes?). This morning, it was much better timing for them to be discussing the issue, after a day and night of hard rain and in the midst of a flash flood alert. That fact did not go unnoticed or unmentioned at the meeting this morning.

The meeting was dull, even as meetings go, despite the big themes under discussion.

Karen Stearns, the project manager for URS, which has been contracted to do the master plan ($1.5 million, paid by the city out of bond funds), gave an overview of the plan parameters, and the schedule. Patsy Tennyson, with Katz and Associates, gave an overview of how to work with the public -- or, less charitably, how to sell the public on the master plan.

All this got me thinking about a question I've had for a few months. How is it that the PSB developed a fee structure before knowing exactly what it needed to do?

The plan that was developed following the storms of summer, 2006, had three phases. I'm going to take license and state it in plain language: The first phase was things in need of immediate repair; the second phase was things that need to get done pretty quickly; the third was things we know need to be done but aren't pressing.

The city sold about $115 million in bonds to take care of phase 1 and some of phase 2.

It held off on a planned second sale after the stormwater utility was created, with the idea that the fees for the utility would generate the money needed to do … what?

And there we go, back to that question.

Apparently, the first attempt to identify what needed to be done -- aside from the obvious wreckage to be repaired and maintenance to be done -- either was incomplete, or simply missed the mark. Otherwise, why would a new master plan need to be created?

And why would they set up a fee structure before they had a budget and before they had a script to work from (view budget adopted May 9, 2008, via link below)?

So, here's what I think:

-- El Paso's drainage infrastructure has major flaws.

-- This City Council has made a point of trying to fix things that have been neglected for years. That's not always easy, and it costs money.

-- When the flooding hit in 2006, what initially turned into disaster response turned into an opportunity to take an aggressive, dramatic action to fix longstanding problems. [under azar, stormwater plan rained on three political careers, june 12, 2008]

-- The planning for it was very public and very open, unlike such other major initiatives as, say, the Downtown Plan. The planning also was very incomplete.

-- If the utility had not been created, and the city sold its bonds and waited for the PSB to perform a drainage master plan study and create a budget, by now, the political will to create a stormwater utility and produce dramatic fixes to the system might already have dissipated.

-- That led to the choice to create the thing, then work back to a set of numbers that could be tied to a capital improvements plan and a budget. It's going to be a lot harder to kill a stormwater utility now that it's alive (pending, of course, the challenge from Ray Gilbert) than it would have been to use a drawn-out process to kill it. As an aside, El Paso has developed the drawn-out process to an art form (not that stopping the government from doing things is always the wrong choice).

There's no doubt El Paso needs better storm drainage. We used to have a great system, free, called arroyos. What we've replaced them with clearly is not sufficient.

Besides the bills that homeowners and businesses nearly revolted over, there is a lingering bitter taste for people who live in formerly rural areas in the river valley that were promised city services when annexed into the city, and still have chronic road flooding when it rains. And there is the observation regarding where the biggest drainage problem -- or at least, the acute problem -- came from. As in medicine, our culture excels at treating emergencies, but doesn't do real well when it comes to long-term wellness, whether it's in the human body or the body civic.

As Stearns pointed out when asked what areas get the most rainfall or have the most severe problems, the rainfall tends to accumulate "typically closer to the mountain range … but that is upstream."

What she meant is that the water starts there, and ends up in the river.

Downhill.

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