Shutdown Threatened Water Infrastructure Project

The closure of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development offices threatened to affect Glasgow’s upgrade to the water infrastructure prior to the end of the government shutdown on Friday, Jan. 25. According to the Director of Public Works Robert Kompel, if the Rural Development Office had not been able to process loan and grant payments for the project within the next month, then the city may have been forced to delay the upgrade. With parts on order and contractors lined up to begin work, that would have added additional cost to the project's already large $8.8 million price tag.

The project, which according to Kompel, has been in the works for over five years and finally received all the necessary funding packages just last month to make upgrades to the water treatment plant, the pipeline and water intake at the Missouri River, at pumping stations and to two reservoirs in the city. The entire project is set to cost $8,854,500 and the funding will come from a series of USDA rural development (RD) loans and grants, city funds and a Treasure State Endowment Program (TSEP) grant.

Two of the RD loans totaling $7,145,000 and an RD grant for $813,600 could not be paid out while the government was shut down. According to Kompel the applications could not be processed while RD was closed, even as the city had started to incur costs from ordering parts and the contractors work begins.

“Right now [the shutdown] is not affecting anything,” stated Kompel in an interview last week before the shutdown ended. Kompel stated that if the government closes again in three weeks the project would still be under threat. This would be especially true if Rural Development was unable to process the payment applications before possibly closing again in mid-February. “We’re going to be in the same boat,” explained Kompel.

“We may get into a situation where we may have to stop work on the project,” said Kompel, before continuing on to say that if the project were to be halted then the contractor will probably go onto a different projects, forcing the process to incur additional costs in the long run if payments cannot be made.

According to Kompel, the normal pay time for an application is around two weeks. With the government having been shut down for 35 days, he was unable to say whether the applications will be paid out before the next shutdown’s potential start date in three weeks.

“It has been five years in the making and we finally get it to a point where it rolls on its own and now we have this big speed bump in front of us,” lamented Kompel.

The water infrastructure upgrade was billed as an essential project for the city, which has not seen a significant water treatment upgrade since the 1980s. It is also the second major water project in the town following the massive overhaul of the sewage treatment plant a number of years back.

Kompel described a sense of urgency for the project and a hope that everything would move ahead as planned stating, “Ultimately if they shut down indefinitely it would kill the project.”

President of the Glasgow City Council Rod Karst echoed Kompel’s concerns about the time and money invested into the project as well as the necessity of upgrading the water treatment plant. “It just shows you that if people in D.C. can’t play together it affects everybody,” said Karst before reiterating, “People think it doesn’t affect us but it does.”