City council reps hear from frustrated citizens

The Beggs Public Works Authority held an emergency meeting on Tuesday night to address residents’ concerns regarding the city’s water system which has left multiple residents without water for over a week.

According to the agenda, the discussion centered on “current issues with the Beggs water system, including the source of the problem, current plans and efforts, status of grant projects, and both short- and long-term solutions.”

Mayor Jacob Branson began the meeting by requesting attendees wishing to speak to submit a written form.

The first hour of the meeting involved the mayor and city ward representatives reintroducing themselves and sharing their views on the emergency and resolution efforts.

Mayor Branson empathized with upset residents and explained that he and other officials are dealing with the same outage and are just as eager to have it resolved.

“I understand why it’s frustrating,” Mayor Branson said. “I’m frustrated. We don’t have water … I got sewer backing up in my house right now as well, my septic systems acting up. So not only do I have that going on, I don’t have a good way to clean up the stuff that’s overflowed into the floor. But here we are.”

Ward 1 Councilman Chris Gore then provided background information on the situation. “We just are having trouble pressuring up the system enough to make it a sustainable service to the city for an extended period of time,” Gore explained, citing challenges in maintaining pressure in the system and at the water tower.

Councilman Gore explained that while attempting to pressure up the system and fill the water tower “either we run low at the treatment plant, or we just get full of air and our employees are running from the pump house out to the new line that was put in.”

The water line Councilman Gore mentioned was installed in 2022, and since then Beggs has had several multi-day outages.

The line installation was funded by the state and work was completed by a contractor “that we [Beggs City Council] didn’t even pick,” Councilman Gore said. He said the council notified the contractor that no water was coming through the system. According to Gore, the contractor told them it was built to the engineer’s specifications and the engineer stood by his specs.

Gore said the engineer did not resolve the issue, and it was only after pressure from the State that they returned and installed blow off valves on the system’s high spots. Now, those high spots are catching air, and the blowoff valves are not functioning properly. As more air enters the line, water pressure decreases.

Gore went on to explain how the weather complicated repair efforts. Ice and freezing temperatures made it difficult to find leaks, and residents understandably letting their faucets drip in the extreme cold put additional strain on the system.

“This is just a situation that is unlike the ones we had before,” Gore said. “So every time since June of 2022, we figured out a new thing that works. And a new step that works. There’s always a different variable thrown in when it’s a normal … outage, they know how to get it back up and running. This one is just a little bit of a different variable. And they’re having trouble figuring out how to pump up the system to the point that it needs to get. And so right now that’s kind of what’s going on.”

He also said that Beggs has $2.4 million in grants coming to address water infrastructure, including making sure the clearwell is back operational.

However, “when you’re using other people’s money, you move at their pace,” Gore said, attempting to appease those residents who feel that delayed repairs are the result of a lack of urgency.

“So those sorts of things like getting the clearwell in service will help hugely how the water system was plumbed to work in the first place,” he said.

Mayor Branson then addressed state and federal funding challenges, using FEMA assistance as an example, and clarified misconceptions about capital improvement funds. Branson explained that while those funds are used to pay for the wastewater plant, when residents don’t pay their bills, the city takes on that financial responsibility.

He also made clear that the Beggs City Council and Public Works Authority are two different entities and he can’t simply move funds freely between the two.

State Representative Scott Fetgatter spoke about the state’s efforts to secure ARPA funds, mentioning the collaboration with the Choctaw, Cherokee, and Muscogee Nations for infrastructure projects, including repairs at the Beggs dam.

“So just so the room understands, the federal government had the ARPA funding, and that’s the funding that we in the legislature worked on last year for infrastructure projects, different things like that all across the state.”

Councilwoman Cindy Hubbell turned the conversation back to the problematic line installation, stating that when it was installed, it was not approved by the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ). Mayor Branson said that he’d asked the engineer three times whether or not they had DEQ approval and “they said they had it.”

“We didn’t even receive plans after it was built,” Councilwoman Hubbell said. She went on to say that before she was on the council, she went to Rural Water Districts #6 and #7 about providing emergency connections to Beggs and offered that as a potential resolution.

Some residents and council members had reservations about handing over control of the city’s water to an outside entity.

“We’re gonna use our grants to fix our system and then give it to them?” Mayor Branson asked.

“Who cares? I don’t know about you, but I don’t care who I pay when I turn that faucet on at my house and get good clean water that passes tests. I don’t care,” Hubbell said.

One resident asked how such a move would impact rates, and how those rates could affect low and fixed income residents. Hubbell pushed back on the claim saying, “Well, let me tell you why the City of Beggs [Beggs Public Works Authority] is going to have to raise the rates. They can’t operate at a loss like they’ve been.”

Ward 2 Councilman Richard Roberts then expounded on the idea of RWD6 taking over the city’s water system.

“If Okmulgee 6 were to take over our water, they’ll take over the entire thing – our assets, our liabilities, our grants, our everything,” Roberts said, but he was more supportive of the potential move.

“They’ve got the money and we don’t,” Roberts said, adding that they would not enter into any contract with RWD6 that would include Beggs giving up its water rights.

The issue of water sovereignty came up a few times during the meeting, with both Mayor Branson and Councilman Gore voicing their support for maintaining control over the city’s water system.

Councilman Gore even cited a 2017 Washington Post article discussing the consequences of public water systems being sold to private companies.

According to the article, towns sell their public water systems – and come to regret it, Elizabeth Douglass cites “neglected water infrastructure” as a national plague and writes that the town of Lake Station, Ind. voted to sell their water system to the private company American Water.

Indiana law allows these private companies to spread their cost among all customers in systems that they own, meaning that customers in other systems owned by American Water could be forced to take on the cost of buying Lake Station’ water system.

Councilman Roberts correctly stated that the company in the article was privately owned unlike RWD6, which is member owned, according to Councilwoman Hubbell.

Bringing the conversation back to Beggs, Councilman Gore opened the floor to attendees. Each person had about two minutes to speak.

The first speaker simply thanked those who have braved the cold weather in order to find a resolution to the ongoing problem.

“I see those workers down in the mud. It’s zero degrees. It’s 30 degrees or below. And so I’d like to thank those workers out there,” the man said.

One resident disagreed with the framing of RW6 as an “outside source” and said that there are citizens served by RWD6 already.

The next two speakers, one being District 1 Commissioner Erik Zoellner, also commended the workers and voiced their support for a RWD6 or 7 takeover.

“I think Cindy hit the nail on the head, it looks like rates are gonna go up, whether it’s a rural water district or whether it’s us. So I think we need to keenly look at that idea. And at least negotiate our visit with Rural Water District six, and just see what it looks like,” Zoellner said.

Councilman Gore said that while he didn’t necessarily like Councilwoman Hubbell’s recommendation, “I think it would be foolish in this situation, not to explore every avenue.”

For the next 30 or so minutes of the meeting, residents and council members engaged in a healthy back and forth about how to address the issue.

Councilman Gore also explained that moving forward, any action would be on an agenda and residents will be able to see what they intend to vote on. He encouraged them to get familiar with their representative and let them know what action they would like to see taken.

Near the end of the meeting, Mayor Branson reiterated that while hopeful, he did not guarantee the water would be restored that night.

In speaking with Mayor Branson the following morning, he said that the system was trending in the right direction but did not say that things were back to normal.

In a post to the Beggs Community Facebook page on Wednesday night, Councilwoman Hubbell wrote that an engineer provided plans for an emergency connection from RWD7 to the Beggs School System in 2023.

She said she asked for a motion late last year “stating the line would be paid for by city funds and reimbursed by the grant funds when they were received.” The motion was approved at a Jan. 8 meeting and Hubbell said that a line could be installed near the end of February. According to Hubbell, the approved grant will cover 80 percent of the line installation costs.

As for the current status of the water system, the last update to the city’s website says: “Other than the one-hour period when the pump had to be shut off to repair a broken valve on the new line into town, the system continues to function well and has kept the town and tower filled. When the pump was turned off the city consumed the entire water tower (50,000 gallons) in less than 2 hours which is understandable after the long outage, but that left people on the hill and those in outlying areas without pressure. The system regained full pressure within the hour and has since functioned fully. There are currently no other known issues and we expect the system to continue to supply full service to all.”

Due to a few setbacks with the water system yesterday evening, Beggs Public Schools went back to virtual classes for the day.

You can find the most recent updates at https://beggs. municipalimpact.com/.