Hill County Commission working to fund lift station improvements

The Hill County Commission is working to upgrade the lift stations in North Havre in the coming years in an attempt to improve their efficiency and get ahead of any potential environmental or health-related dangers these stations may cause in the future.

Hill County Commissioner Mark Peterson said lift stations 11 and 22 have been upgraded in the last five years and the commission is looking to bring lift station 21 up to date as well.

He said station 21 is not yet at risk of causing sewage related health or environmental risks, but Hill County Commissioner Diane McLean said the now upgraded stations have caused such problems in the past.

She said station 22’s problems caused people in the area to end up with sewage in their basements, creating a serious health hazard, and Peterson said, before station 11 was upgraded there was some fear that the sewage lines could be ruptured by ice flows where they cross the Milk River and leak sewage. The commission is looking to avoid similar situations with the remaining stations.

He said station 21 and station 29/30 both require these upgrades, but the costs are high enough that the commission can only focus on 21 for now.

“Looking at the numbers, we decided we could only do one at a time,” he said.

Peterson said while the pumps themselves are new, the infrastructure of the station is decades old and the station really should have a number of modern features for the sake of improved efficiency and safety, such as stand-by power and improved collection tanks.

McLean said alarms and additional generators are also improvements that the stations should have.

She said each lift station will cost around $500,000 to fully upgrade, and the commission is in the process of getting funding for the project.

Last week, the commission unanimously voted to move forward on a TSEP grant application, which can award a maximum of $260,500, which was just submitted by Bear Paw Development Corp.

McLean said the deadline for application was coming up, so the commission had to act quickly if they wanted the application to be considered by the Legislature in 2021.

She said the commission has had favorable results with similar grants and complimented Bear Paw’s efforts on similar grant applications, but she said, ultimately, this funding is not a sure thing.

“There’s no guarantees on getting any of it,” she said.

Hill County Commissioner Mike Wendland said the TSEP grant is sometimes not awarded to a project because so many people in the state are looking to get funding for their own projects, and ultimately decisions will need to be made on the state level about who or what gets priority.

“Everybody in the state is applying to the TSEP,” Wendland said.

The commission is also working on a Community Development Block Grant of similar value to bring funding to the needed $500,000.

Peterson said this is a particularly troublesome year when it comes to funding.

“When you go to Helena you kind of have an expectation,” he said, “but with COVID and everything else that’s happening right now, you don’t have a clue.”

McLean said the grants will be awarded in May of 2021, so the improvements couldn’t begin until the spring and summer of 2022.

“We try to plan ahead, but nothing happens in a year,” Peterson said.

McLean said if all goes well the commission will start looking at applications for the grants to improve station 29/30, in 2022.

If these grant applications are rejected in their entirety, Peterson said, the county will just have to work with what they have when it comes to the lift stations.

McLean said the reason the commission is not considering using a tax increase is because relatively few people live around the lift stations and most of them are low-income households.

She said, given the expense of the proposed upgrades, the people who live near the lift stations cannot reasonably be expected to carry what she said would be an impossibly high financial burden.