Inside Arvada

Inside Arvada Utilities Projects with Mary Stahl

• Season 1 • Episode 31

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Utilities Engineering Manager, Mary Stahl discusses some of the public improvement projects happening throughout Arvada to replace aging water and sewer systems. Much of Arvada's underground utilities were installed in the 1960s-70s and now, 50-60 years later, they need to be replaced to maintain public health and prevent service disruptions.

In this episode:

Visit arvadaco.gov/publicimprovementprojects for a map of current infrastructure projects throughout the city.

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Visit us at ArvadaCO.gov/Podcast or email us at podcast@arvada.org.

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Inside Arvada, the City of Arvada's official podcast. I'm one of your hosts, katie Patterson, and today we're really excited for our guest, mary Stahl. Mary is the Utilities Engineering Manager and she's been with the city for about four years, after a long career in consulting work and working at another municipality focused on what she does here as well drinking water and sanitary sewer services. Mary has a bachelor's degree in civil engineering and physical sciences from CSU go Rams and a master's in civil and environmental engineering from the University of California at Davis, and Mary actually started kindergarten at Seacrest Elementary School right here in Nevada and then came back to raise her family here. And, as always, I'm joined by my co-host, sean hey, Sean.

Speaker 2:

Hi Katie. Informative interview with Mary. I really enjoyed it. We talked about a lot of different projects that are going on around the city. One thing we didn't mention during the interview is that we have a page, a public improvement project page, where all these projects are listed out and then you can click through to each project to learn more about each specific project. So we wanted to mention that at the top of our show. We'll link to that public improvement project page in the show notes project page in the show notes.

Speaker 1:

Hi Mary, Thanks for joining us today.

Speaker 3:

So to get us started, just tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do for the city. So I am the Utilities Engineering Manager and my group plans and implements all our capital improvements projects for drinking water and wastewater.

Speaker 1:

And I think we've explained before that a capital improvement project is like a big kind of overhaul project that's separately funded from general like operations and maintenance type work, and so that's what that means for our listeners.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and we have quite a number of capital improvement projects going on throughout the city One over at Sheridan, between 68th and 76,. A little further south at Tennyson, just north of the railroad tracks there, there's one going on in Indiana near Kendellis, and also in the Sierra Vista neighborhood. We've had some recent ones wrap up along the Rawson Creek Trail there at Danny Kendrick Park East and Davis Lane Park. So you know what is going on with all these projects. We see, like you know, parks and roads torn up and pipes. So what's going on with all these projects? We see parks and roads torn up and pipes. So what's going on with all these projects around town?

Speaker 3:

So most of our drinking water and wastewater infrastructure is underground and we do try to keep it in roads, but wastewater in particular flows by gravity, so that means we follow creeks on the wastewater side and much of our infrastructure was built in the 60s and 70s, when Arvada experienced a lot of growth. And here we are we're 50 to 60 years later and much of this infrastructure needs to be replaced. The project out on Indiana near Candelas is actually resilience and growth related versus replacement, because that is a newer part of town, but the others that you've mentioned are just fixing stuff that's been in the ground a really long time.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and we have two for the sewer side, which is a lot of the bigger projects right now in Sheridan and Tennyson there's two big. We call them trunk lines. I think we might use that terminology a little bit throughout this. So can you explain a little bit what a trunk line is and the two that we'll be talking about, where those are?

Speaker 3:

Sure. So a trunk line, also called an interceptor, just means it's a really big pipe. So the pipe out in front of your house is probably fairly small for us, meaning about eight inches, and all those eight inch pipes come together and eventually become much larger pipes. And the trunk lines are where we've collected sewage from multiple neighborhoods.

Speaker 2:

And there's what? Three trunk lines in the city right there are.

Speaker 3:

North, central and south there are so the north trunk line takes about the northern third of the city, pretty much everything in the Little Dry Creek Basin. As I said, they follow creeks. The central Ralston trunk line generally follows Ralston Creek and takes about half the city, and then what we call our south trunk line generally takes from about Grandview to the southern city limits.

Speaker 1:

Nice. So this work is disruptive for people, but it's also really important. But it can be expensive. It comes with a cost, and so that translates into the rates and fees that our customers pay for the services that we're providing. It also translates into the rates and fees that our customers pay for the services that we're providing. It also translates into system development charges that our developers pay when we expand capacity of a system. And then we also leverage bonds to help with dispersing this cost over time, so that these big projects the folks who are benefiting from them once they're complete, are really the ones that are paying back that bond over the longer term. And so we have a business manager who's dedicated to the financial planning of all this work, and we'll ask our listeners is that something you want to learn more about? Because it's complex in a lot of ways? But she'd be happy to come on. I'm sure, but from your side of things, that's kind of the cost of doing the work. But what's the cost of not doing the work?

Speaker 3:

So really our job is public health and safety. On the drinking water side, that means providing water that is safe to drink, that is, in the quantity that is needed, and so not doing the work means we're more likely to have water breaks. Every time you have a water break, you have the potential for contamination because the pipe is broken and other things can come into the pipe. On the sewer side, our job is to keep sewage in the pipe until it can be treated and made safe to return to our creeks. And so again, as pipes age, they can break, and then we could release raw sewage, which could be a public health.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I think we've seen some examples across the country of when things either go wrong or a natural disaster happens or that sort of thing. I know I've also experienced, like when you go to a different country, like the level of service can just be different somewhere else. So I don't know where I was going with that, but I just think it's interesting, like we have really high standards for how we expect those systems to work and like I was thinking about the day we have like a day without water. It's like a campaign about what would you do? You know?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. Yeah, you take a lot of it for granted that you go in your kitchen, your bathroom, you turn on the faucet and the water comes out and it's clean and it's able to drink. But that doesn't happen automatically. It's not magic. It's a lot of work that goes into making that possible.

Speaker 3:

And I like to challenge people to think about a day without sewage. I really think not having sewer makes things uninhabitable faster than not having water, because we can always go buy water from a store if we're having issues. But on the other hand, getting rid of our waste is much more challenging without a sanitary sewer system.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's such a good point and we think about water a lot more because we feel it, we drink it, we shower in it, we wash our clothes in it, but we just flush the toilet or it just goes down the drain, like it's a pretty passive experience with sewage too.

Speaker 2:

So we've got hundreds of miles of these water pipes, of these sewage pipes throughout the city on the trunk lines, and they all need maintained, they all need to be replaced at some point. How do we determine the needs of our systems and what needs replaced, when and prioritized?

Speaker 3:

That is a great question. We are a data-driven organization so we try very hard to use our data in useful ways and we prioritize projects from a number of things. We have what is called our long-term planning database, which is every asset in the system. That's over $20,000. We evaluate its condition, we evaluate its useful life, we evaluate how much it would cost to replace it to modern standards and we can use that to prioritize our projects. We do a ton of master planning. The city council directed us in the late teens to do master planning for all portions of the system and those master plans have highlighted some big picture, broader picture things that you don't get from a database. That need to be done and that's really where the trunk line projects have come from is highlighting condition and capacity issues on those trunk lines. And then we talk to our operators and we use brake data. So we have data on all our pipe brakes and if a neighborhood starts seeing a lot of brakes then we prioritize doing something in that neighborhood.

Speaker 1:

Was that some of the impetus for this year? Vista neighborhood that's going on right now.

Speaker 3:

It was. The Sierra Vista neighborhood was starting to experience quite a few breaks, and so it was time to do it. There was also some resilience work that needed to be done in the Sierra Vista neighborhood, so that dovetailed nicely.

Speaker 1:

Could you maybe too long? Didn't read what resilience means in this context for folks.

Speaker 3:

I sure can. So when we talk about resilience, we're talking about the ability to provide services in more than one way, or to reliably provide service. So, for example, most pipes in our neighborhoods are eight-inch pipes, but at some point you need a bigger pipe to provide water to the entire neighborhood or to provide water from a transmission main, which, like an interceptor, just means a much bigger pipe. And so the work in the Sierra Vista neighborhood was to replace some of those 8-inch pipes with 12-inch pipes, just to provide better flow.

Speaker 1:

Got it, thanks. So what are some other efforts on the horizon for the?

Speaker 3:

team. We, as I mentioned, much of the city was built in the 60s and 70s, so that means we have a lot of infrastructure that is at that 50 to 60 year mark. On the horizon is replacement of a water treatment plant that is at end of life. We have fantastic operators that are doing a great job with it, but it's time we have our ongoing water and sewer projects through the neighborhoods that work on rehabilitating and replacing that pipe. That's right in front of your house, and that's mostly what we're doing in Sierra Vista. And then we have a lot more trunk line work on the sewer side, particularly the north trunk line. The vast majority of it, as I said, was built in 1962. And condition-wise, it needs to be replaced and it serves the northwest part of town. And so we are putting in bigger pipes as we replace the old pipes to make sure that that pipe is big enough for the next 50 to 60 years.

Speaker 2:

Putting you on the spot here a little bit. It seems like we're doing the sewer line upsizing in segments. Do you have an idea of like all right, on this main trunk line or the north trunk line, we're like 50% done, replacing the whole thing, or like do you have like a map of like how many segments we have left?

Speaker 3:

We do have maps Putting me on the spot. I would say that the Central Ralston trunk line, interestingly the eastern half, is the right size. We are doing a deeper dive on condition but that likely will not involve digging up the streets. We can do that trenchless. So there's not a lot of length left on the central Ralston trunk. We have one, two major projects left on the central Ralston trunk. The north trunk we have quite a bit. We actually pretty much the entire thing from Alkiah to Tennyson is needing replacement and I forgot that on our upcoming. We are bidding very soon, probably by the time this comes out, what we call NTL 23, which is along 86 Parkway. So that's the next big major segment and then we have some segments in between. What we've done to finish it off.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, kind of like our roads. I mean, we're just kind of at that point in time in our city's history right where a lot of the infrastructure was put in place 50, 60 years ago and it's time to replace it. So I'm sure there are some frequent questions or misconceptions that you get about the work you do. So we ask our guests kind of toward the end of each interview what are some things you'd like to clarify about the work that you and your team do?

Speaker 3:

I hear a lot that water should be free. Water is a basic right and a human need. We all you know, we've all heard the statistic you can only go like three days or something without water. And First of all, colorado water law does not make water free. But if we presume water should be free, what you're actually paying for is all the infrastructure and all the work to make it safe and to deliver it to your tap. I challenge people to think about, if you weren't paying for this service, what it would take for you to go down to Clear Creek or Ralston Creek and lug buckets of water, how much that would take. And so that's really what you're paying for. Is you're paying for all the infrastructure, all the labor, all the knowledge to provide the water safely to your house and in the quantity that you want, and to remove the waste and make it safe again.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think that's a really good one. And I was thinking about, about, you know, other countries where you do pay for water, even like in a restaurant, right, we don't. It kind of changes the concept a little bit for us. But, um, yeah, I think that's a really great, great point. And same with wastewater, right, like what, and we talked about that. What would we do without it? And even which we didn't talk about, um, because your team doesn't necessarily work on it, is stormwater. It's the same thing. What would we do without storm pipe and systems to get these rainwaters, which we've seen a lot of in the last few weeks, to not flood our homes? Yes, so, yeah, well, thanks, should we go to lightning round?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 1:

All right, so first up, what's your favorite thing about Arvada? It can be a place, fact, hidden gem, anything.

Speaker 3:

I think it's that in 20 minutes I can be on a hiking trail that is completely remote and in 20 minutes I can be in downtown Denver.

Speaker 2:

Yeah that's a good one. That's a great answer. Yeah, I like that. I think the first time we've heard that it's like parks, but more yeah, no.

Speaker 4:

I mean, there's so many things I could say Totally that's a good one. How we ended up here, I think, was really that fact right. There is that 20 minutes we can get. We can almost get to Boulder, we can get to downtown and we can be hiking.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah. What was your first, last or best concert?

Speaker 3:

That is a hard one. I think I'll say maybe Nashville, so not a specific concert, but my husband had a conference in Nashville late last summer and I'd never been, and walking that music row and just popping in to establishments as you walk down was amazing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I got to do that for the first time in the last few years. Agreed, very cool. What brought you to Arvada?

Speaker 3:

So when we were looking to buy our first house as a couple, it was going to be the house we raised our kids in, and there were just a lot of things about Arvada that were fantastic, and I started elementary school here, and then, after the fact, you got to work for the city. Yes.

Speaker 1:

That's only been for a few years. Yeah, what was your first job?

Speaker 3:

My first paid job outside of babysitting and those kinds of things, was Wenschel's Donuts.

Speaker 1:

Ooh, nice.

Speaker 3:

I don't eat donuts.

Speaker 2:

Probably made it easier, then, right. Well, I ate donuts and then I worked there and they were free, gotcha.

Speaker 4:

And now I don't. I have not eaten donuts in a long time.

Speaker 1:

Had too many donuts, I did. Do you have to?

Speaker 2:

get up at like 4 o'clock or be there super early.

Speaker 3:

No, Wenchel's at that point in time was open 24 hours all of their locations and so I worked the 4 pm to 10 pm shift, okay, which was great, because I just cleaned up and got everything ready for the baker and then what few customers came in. So most nights I was doing homework by 6 37 o'clock. What's your favorite project that you've done with the city? Uh, they've all had really fun challenges. I think maybe my favorite, though, was starting that long-term database. I started it I talked about yeah, because it was a great introduction to everyone in the city and all the different operations crews, because we go out and see every big piece of infrastructure every four years and our initial putting that database together. We went out and saw all the infrastructure, so it was a great introduction to the city.

Speaker 1:

Very cool. Well, Mary, thanks so much for coming on today. Thank you.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, Mary. As a reminder, we love to hear from our listeners. You can stay in touch by texting us. There's a link in the top of each episode. You can always reach out via email as well. At podcast at arvadaorg, we love hearing feedback from our listeners about what you enjoy about the podcast, as well as questions for guests, ideas for future episodes and more.

Speaker 2:

Coming up here shortly is our annual 4th of July fireworks display out at Stenger Sports Complex. That'll be on the 4th of July. Gates open at Stenger at 6.30 pm and the fireworks will start around 9.15 pm, give or take. As Adele mentioned last episode, it's hard to pinpoint exact starting time, but that will be coming up on July 4th. Before that, though, is the annual kids fishing contest.

Speaker 2:

That's Saturday June 14th at Arvada Blonde Reservoir. The contest is free for kids ages 14 and under. Fishing starts at 7 am and goes until 11.30. Then there will be a trophy presentation and a raffle drawing. So the reservoir will be closed until 2 PM. For all other visitors that day and for more information you can visit arvadacogov slash fishing dash contest. And then on Friday June 27th, we have our first movies around town event of the summer. I will be showing the Goonies at Memorial park, and so go ahead and grab a blanket and some friends and enjoy a free showing of that movie there, and get there early to enjoy some live music as well, before the showing. And then, finally, I know we've got Bike to Work Day coming up, Katie.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So Bike to Work Day is coming up on Wednesday, june 25th, and the city hosts two stations for burritos and coffee for cyclists in the morning. One will be at Memorial Park and the other at Gold Strike Park, and you can find a map of all of the stations around the metro area that'll be active that day. Usually, colorado Taphouse does something, and that's on the Dr Cog Way to Go website, which is biketoworkdayco. That's on the Dr Cog Way to Go website, which is biketoworkdayco. And then, as I've mentioned before, we partner with Resource Central for Arvada water customers to get discounts on a variety of outdoor water conservation programs, and a new discount that's available this year that we're excited for is the fall garden in the box. So we always have a spring garden in the box, but this one's to plant in the fall, and the presale for that opens on June 18th, and this program is super popular, so it tends to sell out really quickly, and so we do encourage folks to sign up on the registration list at resourcecentralorg. And thank you again.

Speaker 1:

So much to our guest today, mary Stahl. Be sure to listen to our next episode with the city's new city manager, don Wick. We're going to just get to know. Don a little bit more and here just try to understand. What does a city manager even do here in Arvada? And as always, today's episode was recorded and edited by Arvada Media Services.

Speaker 2:

And today's fun fact is that in 2024, the utilities team helped rehabilitate or replace over 48,000 linear feet of water and sewer lines.