Clay County Commission

Dan Haglund

Two area rural water experts updated the Clay County Board of Commissioners on the progress of the West Central Regional Water District on Tuesday in Moorhead.
Lucas Spaeth, WCRWD board chair as well as the utility superintendent for the city of Halstad, said the major needs for the project included water quality concerns, aging infrastructure, lack of licensed operators, high capital costs and emerging contaminants.
The West Central Regional Water District includes the counties of Clay, Norman and Polk. The district established final boundaries last spring, encompassing 30 cities and approximately 40,000 people. Its supply comes from existing Minnesota and North Dakota municipal and rural water systems, and is the first rural water district formed in the state since 1985.
Cities in the northern portion include Trail, Gully and Crookston, and on the southern end Barnesville and Comstock.
Spaeth said the aging infrastructure hits the rural areas harder than in the metro, and that upgrades have become quite critical.
“It could be water treatment facilities, it could be water towers,” Spaeth said. “Some have other needs in their distribution systems as well.”
Spaeth also mentioned that the lack of licensed operators has forced some communities to “borrow” those people from other cities.
Steven Slick, an AE2S engineer, explained the progress of the district a bit further.
Slick said the conception of the project came around in 2019-20 with the city of Climax looking for a long-term water supply after a decade of discussions. Climax eventually connected with the East Central Water District on the North Dakota side of the Red River, and determined that it would be a good long-term fit for its water needs. Climax had been facing high arsenic content issues within its groundwater as well as an aging water treatment facility.
Throughout the needs discovery process, which included the logistics of piping water across state lines and over a river, that there were myriad rural water needs in other areas of the three counties as well.
By 2021, the geographic area of concern included a Highway 75 corridor of small cities (Nielsville, Shelly and Halstad), and by 2022 it included additional cities to the east (Ada, Borup and Beltrami) and south (Hendrum and Perley).
A 12-inch interstate water pipeline was built that year, across to Climax, through the United States Department of Agriculture.
Norman County paid $30,000 for the engineering study in 2022, and the project expanded to Clay County the following year. Then the initial project budget for the counties was set at $135,000 for Polk, $117,000 for Clay and $48,000 for Norman.
“What we’re really looking at in this long-term study,” Slick said, “Is how do you tackle this dart board? It’s a wide area. There’s a lot of variables you don’t know and some that we do.”
Slick said the objective became basically to provide sustainable, long-term potable water for the three counties.
And the approach became planning an extensive network of pipelines, storage and pumping infrastructure.
After that, the feasibility of each phase needed to be determined.
And finally, the implementation of the zone-based expansion started with the large transmission pipelines to the most populated areas, and extending smaller pipelines to rural users.
Slick said the area has been split under a master plan into five geographic zones, based on needs, elevation and infrastructure.
To finalize, Slick gave the board a snapshot of where the project is at.
After the legal formation of the water district, there is an appointment of a head engineer. Then comes the development of an engineering survey.
Next will be to conduct the first public hearing and issue hearing notices, and finally the court will issue an order for a detailed engineering survey.