Water rate hearing floods City Hall

By Ethan Nahté (Part

2 of 2)

Vickie Cearnal, the chair for the LeFlore County Rural Water District No. 17 spoke after the district’s operator, John Butler. She said, “I absolutely believe that our customers who cannot pay will shut off their water. We only have 172 customers in our district. If those customers turn their water off, that could force us into bankruptcy, therefore damaging everyone in the valley.”

Cearnal claims the water rate in the county west of LeFlore cost is $2.47 per thousand gallons, which is $1.24 less than the current rate of $3.71 per thousand gallons less than 10,000 gallons through Mena Water Utilities (MWU).

.A representative of Arkansas State Parks poses questions for Hawkins Weir and Mena Water Utilities at the public hearing. (Ethan Nahté/Pulse)

Cearnal said she was told by their attorney that the MWU rate will make them the second-largest cost of water in the state of Oklahoma, for one of the smallest districts in the Oklahoma.

Some of the questions residents and business owners asked included wondering why the City of Mena has not been planning for the rate increase or correcting the infrastructure issues beforehand. Some residents found it hard to believe that the situation called for the building of a new treatment plant. There were questions of whether or not the City had been setting money aside or if they had applied for grants from either the state or federal. There were also some asking about the rates doubling.

Looney responded, “The base rate will double but the overall bill, when you figure that into 5,000 gallons, will not double. It will be around 40 to 45%, which still stinks.”

Looney addressed the issue of misinformation being spread through social media, suggesting that people are comparing the old rates and new rates and not at the gallons they used to see what the actual difference for the bill will be based on his calculations.

Some asked why there has not been a gradual increase to the base rate before now.

Smith said to the audience they had been trying for four years. “That’s one of the things I campaigned on. I’m not here to lay blame on anybody. The fact of the matter is we have a problem here in front of us and we’re dealing with that problem. We’re doing the best we can with what we have.”

Brett Peters, president and CEO of Hawkins-Weir (HW) said, “The City of Mena and Mena Water Utilities have exhausted every effort in applying for grant funds. Actually, in the base project on the water side and the wastewa- ter die, they received some grants for both the water treatment plant and the wastewater treatment plant. But one of the things that the funding agencies look at, both the federal and the state, is they look at the existing water rates in a community and they compare that to what the median household income is for a community and if the rates aren’t comparable based on those median household levels, it limits the amount of grant funding that community can achieve. That said, even though we got a small amount on both the water and wastewater side, the magnitude of the improvements both necessary to the water treatment plant and the wastewater treatment plant, and the funding agencies acknowledging that Mena was going to have to pass along a large rate increase to both water and wastewater customers, that put [Mena] in an improved position for [Hawkins-Weir] to file applications on Mena’s behalf for ARPA, American Rescue Plan, funds. Those applications went in, in November of 2022 and we received positive word in December of 2022 that Mena was successful in receiving the maximum of $5 million for both water and wastewater.”

Peters went back to James Looney’s speech at the beginning of the meeting, stating that the projects identified today have not been bid yet. “The water treatment project is designed. We hope to advertise it for bid in February [2023],