Need for water survey reported to commission
CITY COMMISSION
Recognition of the O’Connor Animal Shelter volunteers, and a discussion on an EPA- and KDHE-mandated water inventory were some of the items on the agenda at the regular meeting of the Concordia city commission on Wednesday.
Jodi Baker, the City's Animal Control Officer, and volunteers Mary Anderson, Marylu Fellows, Haleigh Stimatze and Victoria Sugrue were recognized for their service to the community.
The shelter is in need of many items: towels/washcloths; blankets and sheets of all sizes, paper towels, bleach, dish soap, clay kitty liter, Kong chew toys, canned dog and cat food, leashes and collars of all sizes, pet crates and taxis of all sizes, exercise pens of all sizes, flea and tick applications for all weights and ages, and live traps – enclosed skunk boxes.
The shelter gratefully accepts donations. Please make your donation at the Police Department or call 785-243-3131 to schedule a meeting time with Animal Control at the shelter.
City Manager Amy Lange reported that city staff has been training on the new Everbridge Mass Notification platform which will take the place of the current Textcaster notification system. Everbridge Mass Notification enables organizations to send notifications via 25+ contact paths to
individuals or groups using lists, locations, and visual intelligence which broadcasts messages to inform the public during times of emergency or disaster.
The city's utilities director Jeremy Arnold informed commissioners of the need for a city-wide survey of water systems to locate any possible lead or copper contaminants, as directed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE).
Lead and copper enter drinking water primarily through plumbing materials. Exposure to lead and copper may cause health problems ranging from stomach distress to brain damage.
In 1991, the EPA published an original regulation to control lead and copper in drinking water. This regulation is known as the Lead and Copper Rule (LCR). Since 1991 the LCR has undergone various revisions.
“This (the survey) is a nationwide thing, in every town,” Arnold said during an interview with the Blade on Thursday, February 2, in which city manager Lange was also in attendance. “We don't have an issue with lead or contaminants being in our water. We do 20 test samples across the town every year. In the 25 years that I've been here, during maintenance, I think we found five lead goose necks in the service lines that had to be replaced because they were leaking or for some other reasons. They're (the KDHE) really looking for lead service lines, and I've never dug one up here.”
Arnold said that in order to comply with this mandate, every service in town will now have to be inventoried, from the main into the house. In addition, KDHE wants to know what kind of plumbing is inside the house of every water customer.
“The entire city has to be surveyed, from the main to the meter to the house,” said Lange. “They want to know the materials of the water piping, including the pipes that enter the home. We will ask our residents to help us gather this information.”
There are 20 questions on the KDHE form for each serviced address, and five or six of those questions will have to be answered by each water customer. City staff is still working on the questionnaire that will be sent to water customers, and hope to be issuing it within a month or so. The KDHE deadline for submitting the inventory is October 2024.
“We understand that the EPA and KDHE want to ensure a safe water supply nationwide,” Lange said, “and we are very careful of the safety of our water supply here. To comply with the LCR, we will have to do this survey and ask that our water customers be helpful in answering several of the questions. If we get no response for an address we will need to request permission to enter the home in order to complete the survey.”
At the end of the meeting on Wednesday, commissioners went into two executive sessions with Lange and city attorney Justin Ferrell lasting a total of 27 minutes. No action was taken. The city commission meeting was officially adjourned at 6:27 p.m.