ALTAMONT — The congressman, in a black overcoat and shiny shoes, bent down to touch a pile of rusty and broken pipes outside the cement-block well house on Gun Club Road. The wind was chill and the gray sky held snow on the first day of spring as a bevy of local officials clustered about Paul Tonko.

Jeffrey Moller, Altamont’s superintendent of public works, wearing a jacket with his name on it and work boots, had gathered the pipes to illustrate for the congressman some of what was underground in the village. Larry Adams, the assistant superintendent, told him Altamont had had two breaks in its water mains this winter and 70 since 2003.

Tonko had previously toured Schenectady and said its system of 240 miles of pipe was 100 years old. “It’s like a lot of spaghetti underground,” he said.

Tonko was on what was billed as a “Water Infrastructure Tour.” He serves on the Energy and Commerce Committee and is the top Democrat on the Environment and the Economy Subcommittee. He would like his committee to work in tandem with the Transportation Committee, which oversees water and sewer, to come up with an omnibus bill to solve infrastructure problems.

“I’m trying to develop a tour concept,” Tonko told The Enterprise. “I want to explain to my colleagues, ‘Let’s do this around the country to raise awareness.’”

Gesturing to Moller in the crowded, hospital-clean well house, Tonko said, “The people that run these systems are aging.” He said their average age is 56. “We need to cultivate the next generation....The institutional knowledge is incredible,” said Tonko. “It takes a lot of work to get certification...It’s an awesome responsibility.”

Tonko’s tour last Friday morning started in Delanson and, after the visit to the wellheads on Gun Club Road, ended in Altamont Village Hall with a roundtable discussion that included mayors from Castleton and Delanson, the Berne supervisor, a Westerlo councilman, and representatives from the United States Department of Agriculture and the New York Rural Water Association.

Tonko told the 20 who had gathered, “It’s our goal to establish a template of information-gathering so we can do this exercise across the country.” While the Northeast suffers from aged infrastructure, he said problems exist “from coast to coast.”

He also said, “This problem is only going to grow. We need to put together a master plan and implement it in a way that is just and fair.”

Funding problems

Jeff Iveson, Delanson’s water commissioner, said the water system there was built by the railroad in the late 1800s, and uses surface water only, from two reservoirs, which is “very vulnerable” to weather and aquatic plants. The small, unmetered system runs on the force of gravity. Ever since Tropical Storm Irene took out the village’s well, Delanson has been out of compliance with state requirements to have two water sources, he said.

“FEMA looked at it,” he said of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but it is hard to find contractors for the amounts allotted, and it has been “a long process” getting the required permits from the Army Corps of Engineers.

The 6-inch mains have been reduced to 4 inches because of sediment building up inside the pipes. A process to clean them “kept exploding” them, said Iveson, because the old cast iron was so brittle.

Delanson started a capital fund, where each household paid $30 annually, and $50,000 was saved. “The one break we just had,” said Iveson, “just about exhausted all our funds.”

“It took five years to build up,” said Gayle Gifford, Delanson’s mayor.

“My biggest fear is when the frost comes out of the ground,” said Iveson, meaning many more breaks are expected with the ground’s heaving.

He works just part-time, Iveson said, because the village can’t afford more. He answers calls about breaks in the lines on his own time and in his own truck, he said. He also works for the town’s highway department and arranged for the village to use the town’s backhoe when needed because it doesn’t have its own. “That’s kept us afloat,” he said.

“Our big problem is lack of funding for water-main replacement,” Altamont’s Moller told Tonko. “We’ve had several cases where we were fixing one water main, which pushed water in another direction and we develop another break...It snowballs,” he said.

Moller explained the lack of funding by saying, “We’re in a loophole here.”

Mayor James Gaughan elaborated, “We’re not eligible because our income is too high” to secure federal grants. “We’re $2,000 to $3,000 over the threshold.” He also said,  “We need an adjustment for size.”

Altamont’s population is about 1,700 and Delanson’s is about 400. Delanson is about $40,000 over the threshold; Iveson said that is because of a handful of very wealthy residents.

“The grant money and rules are so stringent, they may be inadvertently excluding those who need it most,” said Gaughan. “We were told we were able to tax more.”

Berne’s supervisor, Kevin Crosier, said, “The formula no longer fits.” Responding to Gaughan’s comment that Altamont was advised it could tax more, he suggested those officials knock on doors and ask residents if they’ll pay more. “They would come back and tell you it’s not a good idea,” Crosier asserted.

“If they come back at all,” quipped Iveson as laughter rippled around the table.

Gretchen Pinkel, the Greenwich-based area specialist for the United States Department of Agriculture, agreed with Gaughan, “If you’re over the household income level, you’re not eligible,” she said. “Honestly, I see the need for more grant money.”

“Maybe bond money,” mused Tonko.

Joseph Keegan, the mayor of Castleton, who had testified in Washington before Tonko’s committee, spoke of another group that testified, from Mississippi, that had to boil water for six months because the community couldn’t afford to pay for repairs to its water system.

Keegan recommended a system for water infrastructure similar to that for landline telephone users. Everyone, he said, pays a small monthly fee that goes into a general pool so that, when a repair is needed, say, after a storm, there are funds to draw from and therefore response is swift.

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Mandate problems

“The state constantly changes the mandates,” said Iveson.

He used, as an example, the problem with trihalomethane, a gas that results from adding chlorine to water. Guilderland, he said, had suffered from the problem, too.

Donald Csaposs represented Guilderland at the roundtable discussion as Supervisor Kenneth Runion was out of town. This week, Runion said eliminating the problem with trihalomethane, known as TTHM, had been expensive. Guilderland’s drinking water is from the Watervliet Reservoir and three town wells.

In September of 2002, an Enterprise article — “Hot spots: Water woes beneath the surface” — uncovered a problem because many areas of Guilderland had levels of disinfectant byproducts in the 100s of parts per billion, mostly because they were at the end of unlooped water lines where chemicals became more concentrated. The federal Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum contamination limit was 60 parts per billion.

Higher chlorine amounts are typically needed to reach the end of a distribution system; at the end of a pipeline, water and chlorine are in contact for long periods of time. Often dead-end lines produce higher readings.

Chlorine is added to the water to make it microbiologically safe. The disinfectant, however, can react with decaying vegetation or other organic matter and possibly create carcinogens. Two disinfectant byproducts are trihalomethanes, such as chloroform, and haloacetic acids.

Robin Woods, a spokeswoman with the EPA, listed liver and kidney cancer and central nervous-system damage as possible risks of drinking water above the federal standards.

“We eliminated the problem with a two-pronged approach,” Runion said this week.

First, a water purification system, using carbon filters to pull organics out of the water, thereby reducing the amount of chlorine needed, approved in 2004, was installed in 2005 for $2,160,000. The town used money it had set aside in its water reserve to pay for the project, Runion said.

Second, the West End Water Extension, approved in 2005, was built in 2008 for $4.3 million. This project brought water to the western end of town as well as looping the former dead-end lines, and was financed by the entire district since “it made the water quality better for everyone,” he said; the rate is $457 per year for each household.

“We haven’t had any issues since then; we eliminated the TTHM problem,” concluded Runion.

“Unless we get funding,” said Iveson at the roundtable of fixing the problem in Delanson, “we can’t come into compliance.”

“This is happening everywhere across the state,” said Pat Scalera, with the New York Rural Water Association. “The small communities have to meet the same mandates as the large ones. We have to get the EPA out more.”

Tonko responded there might be “opportunities for shared responsibility.”

“It’s difficult,” said Scalera, “because small systems are so far apart.”

She said NYWARN is successful in helping with emergencies because it spans a bigger area. New York’s Water/Wastewater Agency Response Network of utilities promotes statewide emergency preparedness, disaster response, and mutual aid for public and private water and wastewater utilities.

“If one place is wiped out,” Scalera said, a far-away locale can send equipment and labor. In the wake of storms like Sandy, Irene, or Lee, she said, items like generators were shipped to communities in need.

New problem

While most of the roundtable participants focused on the problem of aging infrastructure, William Bichteman, a Westerlo Town Board member who also serves on the town’s water board, brought up a funding problem related to a relatively new system.

The hamlet of Westerlo started a system in response to a 1960s drought, he said. “We replaced that system because we were mandated to do it,” he said. Westerlo’s new system was built in 2006.

“Our problem,” said Bichteman, “is we can’t afford to operate the system.” It has just 77 users, costing each $900 a year, he said. The users couldn’t afford required upgrades, so the upgrades were taken on by the town.

“We currently owe the town for upgrades to comply with regulations,” Bichtemen said, “which are coming out of taxpayers outside of the district. They’re not happy about it.”

There is no way to sell water to raise funds because the rural area is sparsely populated. “We’re in a crack here we can’t get out of,” said Bichteman. “If we raised the rate, there’d be a march on the town hall. They’d burn the place.”

A further problem has developed, he said: “No one wants to build in the hamlet.” Because of the cost of the water system, foreclosed properties sit vacant while residents and businesses, instead, go outside of the hamlet and drill wells for their water.

“We took a bold step last year,” said Bichteman. “We changed the structure of billing...The county is now paying for our water system. I can’t see any way out of it.”

Bichteman elaborated this week on Westerlo’s system, stating, “We’re not unique — having a high cost and not a lot of users” is typical of small municipalities in rural areas.

A drought in the early 1960s, he said, caused the hand-dug wells in Westerlo to dry up. The Hannay family, which owns a hose reel company in town, “allowed an over-ground line to be run from house to house” with water from the Hannay well, said Bichteman. “A farmer, Ralph Goodfellow, let people on the south side use his water. When winter came, so the lines wouldn’t freeze, they were buried underground.” That was the start of the Westerlo water system.

“The cooperative system was plagued with problems; there was not enough money to meet health-department standards,” said Bichteman, so the new system was built in 2006 for over a million dollars. Hannay family residences and the hose-reel plant continue to use the water from the Hannay well, he said.

For the new system, water was billed through meters and a portion was used to pay the 30-year loan, said Bichteman; the payments at $250 per year per user increased over time. There was a minimum charge to be part of the district.

“Last year, we increased the minimum fee an additional 2,000 gallons per quarter,” he said. Since most residents were using well over that, it didn’t increase their fees. However — this was the “bold step” Bichteman mentioned at the roundtable talk — the vacant and foreclosed properties had to pay that fee. Some of the vacant properties are held by mortgage companies or banks or the county itseslf, he said. “They let the water bill accrue and it’s re-levied as part of the property tax. The district collects the levy.”

The future

“We just can’t keep Band-Aiding our way to the future,” said Tonko. “It’s wasteful.”

“It is,” agreed Scalera.

Tonko said there is a growing awareness that roads and bridges need to be repaired, but, with underground water systems, he said, “It’s hidden; it doesn’t get the attention....We keep putting this on the back burner. It will saddle future generations.”

Mayor Gifford said, “Since you’re talking rural, it’s our families,” indicating children often settle in the rural places where they were raised.

Tonko went on to say that the United States advises developing countries on water systems and should be able to care for its own.

Scalera commended him for his interest. “There’s nothing more important than our drinking water, other than the air we breathe,” she said.

Sean Magers, Tonko’s communications director, announced the congressman will hold another roundtable on clean water and water infrastructure on April 1 at Albany City Hall.

Tonko concluded that, after 40 years of “doing this work,” he was not jaded.

“If we speak out about what the needs are — people need to know, this is happening on a street near you — we can bring about change....We want to do it with a sound sense of planning.”