It became apparent to the Junction City Commission Monday night that the city’s water treatment plant and two waste water treatment plants are in dire need of repair.

HDR Engineering recently completed an analysis of the three plants and provided a recommendation summary of what needs to be repaired, replaced or upgraded. That analysis showed that the water treatment plant alone needs an estimated $24.4 million dollars worth of work.

The water treatment plant was constructed in the 1980’s and has not had any major improvements made to it during it’s lifetime. Issues at the plant range from over pumping of water rights to meet demands and a declining well field capacity to non-operational equipment.

“There have been some improvements, but not comprehensive improvements,” explained Gerald Smith, City Manager.

Smith explained that typically a city would have a capital program that would constantly maintain the equipment at a water plant without having a major cost like Junction City is currently facing.

“We’re at a point were we’ve got quite a bit of our equipment there that is at the end of it’s useful life, that has to be replaced in order to keep it operational,” Smith said.

Commissioner Mick McCallister stressed that this is an issue that the commission is facing because of things that didn’t get done in the past.

“We can’t go back to the citizenry and say,’Hey you know what, we didn’t do anything for the past 25 years and you are going to pay for it for the next 25 years,’ and basically that is what it is,” McCallister said.

Mayor Cecil Aska echoed McCallister’s thoughts,”These problems are hitting and we’re having to address things that should have been addressed, and that just continues to pop up at all of our meetings, things that weren’t addressed and we’re trying to address them.”

Commissioner Jim Sands explained that he’s frustrated that the plants got to this point, “I just don’t see how these facilities got to the point of where they are when we have a contractual agreement in place, we have people maintaining it and dog gone it we do yearly inspections. We didn’t get like this overnight.”

Sands further said that he hopes that after the city spends all of the money needed to fix the current problems that a standard plan of scheduled maintenance and programs is put in place to make sure everyone is doing their jobs and things are getting taken care of.

“I feel we got taken. Because some of this stuff, if it’s been going bad for that long we sure should have had something earlier, maybe even years back,” Sands said. “I just feel like I got blindsided and got knocked the heck out.”

The analysis also showed that work needed at the city’s two waste water treatment plants exceeds an estimated $38 million dollars.

Greg McCaffery, Municipal Services Director, explained that we can put the blame on whoever but the fact of the matter is, “We’re here today, and we’re looking at trying to say, where do we go immediately and where do we go long term.”

The next step will be to retain a professional consultant to complete a comprehensive water and sewer rate analysis, which would function as a financial business plan.

Smith explained that the financial plan must be done in a way that is methodical,”and look at it over a long term period of time to see what our rates will have to be over that 20 to 25 year period of time.”

The commission will consider that professional services contract during Tuesday nights city commission meeting.