The board of directors of the Northwest Rural Water District seemed startled Tuesday night to have an audience. Three Powell area residents involved in housing developments were there, as was an engineer working on some of the projects.

To accommodate the public, Josh Shorb, chairman of the district’s board, amended the agenda, and moved the discussion of the O’Donnell and Garland water storage capacity to the top of the meeting. 

At the crux of the discussion was how taps — essentially water connections for households — have become scarce in some of the rural areas around Powell. Northwest Rural Water District Manager Tony Rutherford pointed out that the bottleneck is in the storage capacity on the district’s lines, not in the actual water supply, which comes from the Shoshone Municipal Pipeline.

Speaking to Park County commissioners last week, Rutherford said there’s been a surge in new homes and activations of previously inactive taps from roughly Ralston to Garland in the area south of Powell.

“The boom that we’ve seen in the last year just outpaced us,” he said, saying the district is currently “right out of capacity in the Garland area.”

That includes a parcel next to the Powell Golf Club, where William Ambrose had planned to start a 14-lot subdivision. However, the project has been sidelined by the lack of water taps in the area.

At Tuesday’s district meeting, Ambrose and others suggested possible solutions to the crunch — including recalculating the number of available taps.

The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality requires water systems to have a 24-hour supply in storage, which is based on a complex equation of average daily water use per tap per day.

The water district uses an average supplied by DOWL, an environmental services company with an office in Billings. DOWL took July usage and averaged it out for 30 days, then plugged that figure — 320 gallons per tap per day — into the equation. Using those figures, there might be one tap still available on the Garland line, but one is already pending approval. There are about seven taps available on the O’Donnell line, but there are applications waiting for each of those as well. Some of that capacity has been reserved for subdivisions already in development that have provided a water-need estimate to the water district and the county.

However, Cody Schatz, a professional engineer with Engineering Associates in Cody, suggested another way to calculate the average daily demand. It would take the entire year’s usage, divided across 365 days, resulting in a lower average — 260 gallons per tap per day — and, consequently, a lower 24-hour storage capacity requirement. This calculation would allow an additonal 20 to 100 taps to be added. Schatz said more taps would provide more income to the water district and help fund a project to increase the storage capacity in the affected area.

“We are not questioning the accuracy of the work, but there are other ways to figure this,” he said. “This is a very conservative way to figure it.”

Rutherford said the district planned to apply in June for a grant from the Wyoming Water Development Board to add storage capacity on the O’Donnell-Garland lines. That application would then have to be approved by the Legislature in its 2022 session. If the grant is approved, the project could be bid in early 2023 and completed late that same year. 

But realtor Dave Reetz, who has long been associated with promoting Powell and Park County in various capacities, asked if the project was likely to be funded, considering the money problems the state is currently experiencing.

“It’s going to be tougher and tougher to get that money,” Schatz added.

However, Shorb, the chairman of the board, said the district has never used only its own money for building projects. An auditor advised the district last year that its reserves were inadequate to cover emergency repair and replacements and one year’s worth of operating expenses. Other projects now under construction were funded through the state grant cycle, with the matches met through low-cost federal loans specifically for water infrastructure.

“The one thing the district didn’t expect was the explosion [of demand] in this county with COVID,” Shorb said.

From April 2019 to April 2020, he said 90 taps were added — half on the O’Donnell-Garland lines — and 35 inactive taps were put into use. From April 2018 to April 2019, there were only 27 tap requests.

Seaton Smith of Powell, who owns rocky property near Byron, asked how the district and property owners like himself and Ambrose could work together to find a solution. Ambrose, for his part, has offered to fund a portion of the cost of the expanded storage capacity. He suggested to the board that perhaps he could get some other developers to contribute as well so that their projects could move ahead.

In a follow-up email, Reetz said every housing option in the county is selling almost as fast as it is listed. Smaller lots of land undesirable for agricultural use could be developed for affordable housing, but only if there is room on the water system. In the case of Ambrose’s subdivision, which Reetz had planned to market, the lack of access to Northwest Rural Water’s system will mean the land will have to be divided into larger, more expensive lots to allow room for septic systems to be adequately spaced from drilled water wells. In addition to the cost of drilling, there is the potential for those wells to draw down the water table in the region.

“I’m not sure the public understands how serious this is,” Reetz said.

Speaking to commissioners last week, Rutherford said that, outside the Ralston-Powell-Garland areas, the district is “doing OK” as far as capacity.

However, he said, “all it takes is a handful of big subdivisions to change that real quick on a rural system that’s spread out.”