March 14, 2019 500 AM
PRESIDIO COUNTY – After hearing the 2017 audit, county commissioners, a burn ban was officially put into effect for 90 days, meaning its earliest termination date is June 6. The ban prohibits any open fires, and suggests extreme caution with anything that creates a spark, including cigarettes.
Judge Guevara told Commissioners, “As you know, fire season is upon us. It’s important for us to bring back this burn ban, and it will probably continue going indefinitely. We’ve been having quite a bit of fires especially in the south.”
In other business, Kleinman Consultants, who won the contract for executing a grant to fix water supply systems in Candelaria and Redford, are struggling to find a contractor to do the work on a water tank system in Redford. Ramon Carrasco of the consultancy informed the county they will have to split the job into three parts and get a different contractor for each. They’re seeking contractors to work on the paint and foundation for a water tank, another to do the piping to connect the system together, and a third to get the electrical put together for the controls and lighting on the tanks.
The current Redford tank has been there for 30 years and needs to be cleaned out. It has deposits of sand inside, but it can’t take it out of service until the new tank is added, since Redford is solely dependent on one tank right now.
In Candelaria, work on the main water well is on hold for one to two weeks as the contractors wait for equipment that is currently being used in Jeff Davis County. JP Beebe pointed out that a private water well not far from the town’s well system is producing clean water that doesn’t require treatment, like the town’s system does. “We need to go check it and test it, and it might be better to try to drill another well because that’d save them a lot of hassle,” said the Judge. Commissioners agreed.
Tax Assessor/Collector Natalia Williams presented a new initiative to collect a small tax on Mixed Beverage Permits in the county. Currently, the county is only collecting fees for beer and wine licenses every two years. She said it would bring in between $3,500 and $4,000 every two years. “It’s not a lot of money, but since we’re already collecting for beer and wine, I thought we could collect for mixed beverages.”
Ruben Carrasco of the Road and Bridge Department presented a proposal for the county to build a structure just east of the golf course to house equipment and materials for the Road and Bridge department. The department has had issues with people messing with equipment in their current temporary open air lot where they’ve stored items before. Carrasco said, “We had a complaint or two that they could see the equipment from somewhere, but here there’ll be no problem of Presidio County residents seeing it.” Commissioners approved the new building.
Commissioners voted unanimously to support US House Bill 990 that supports an environmental study on the potential physical wall. It also touts Will Hurd’s concept of a “SMART wall” rather than a fully physical wall spanning the length of the border. Commissioners liked that it was cheaper than a physical wall, and it would not take away access to the river, the way a physical wall would. Commissioners Knight and Aranda both said they are all for keeping our border secure, but this seemed like a reasonable option.
Finally, the end of the meeting concluded with a discussion about Presidio County losing access to apply for a Community Development Block Grant for 2019-2020 due to a lack of oversight on the grant administering. The county was unaware of the rule that they had to complete their previous year’s grant before accessing new funds. The current uncompleted grant is for the Redford and Candelaria water systems, which have struggled to find contractors willing to do the extremely remote work.
Auditor Roach said, “I’m new to this, but we do hire a grant administrator on the CDBG projects, so I’m a little disappointed that maybe we weren’t informed as much. At this point there’s really nothing we can do to push it along. They couldn’t get people to bid on it, so then they had to get approval from the state to split it into smaller portions. I don’t know if theres anything we could’ve necessarily done different. I wish I had better understood what was happening and what could’ve gone better. From here forward there’s going to be a lot more pushing on my end.”
Commissioner Aranda added, “The contractors who came out were working on other projects, because they were getting paid more for other projects.”
