City Council Discusses Decline in Water Quality

BONNERS FERRY — City officials say they are aware of public concerns about the water supply, which have been addressed in phone calls and during comments from two Bonners Ferry residents during Tuesday night's city council meeting.

Resident Tim West said their water was “coming out of our pipes brown, we’ve got calcium in our appliances, it’s made us sick.” He commented further that they found it “offensive” that the city would make changes to the water supply providing lower quality water.

City Administrator Lisa Ailport reported to council members Rick Alonzo, Ron Smith, Adam Arthur and Valerie Thompson, as well as Mayor Richard Staples, that the city has been receiving multiple phone calls and complaints about the water quality.

She said the consistent issue seemed to arise when water was heated, creating a white residue, adding that samples have been taken and sent out for testing.

Ailport went on to say they had little concern about public health and that the expected results from testing would show that the residue is calcium. She said that the issue is considered a nuisance but not a public health risk.

Smith expressed a desire to put out a news release to make sure the public knows the city is concerned about the issue and are working on addressing it.

Ailport responded that they did “reach out to the local media sources to help with the delivery of that information,” although at the time of this report, no one from the city has contacted the Bonners Ferry Herald about the issue.

City Engineer Mike Klaus went on to explain that the city has two water filters the current water supply must run through before the water is disseminated to the public. The Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) requires that a water system is able to provide all necessary water with the largest filter unit out of service. As demand in the Bonners Ferry has grown, the water system was no longer able to meet these capacity requirements.

The city’s solution was to dig a well on about 260 feet from the river on city property in order to augment the water supply. This required a lot of testing to make sure there wasn’t negative surface water influence.

The water was tested for Inorganic Contaminants (IOC), of which there are two categories: primary and secondary, Klaus said. Primaries are regulated by DEQ and must meet certain thresholds, but the secondary are not and generally considered to be a “nuisance” rather than a public health risk.

Calcium falls into the secondary IOC category. At the time of testing, calcium levels were “a little high,” according to Klaus, but nothing they were concerned about. Now, however, they believe the calcium level is much higher than at the time of the original testing. He said they would know more once they receive the results of the new tests.

Once city officials receive the results they will try to develop a strategy to reduce the calcium or somehow fit it “into our system so it’s not as much of a nuisance,” Klaus said.

Ailport also brought up migrating the current email system to Office 365. The current email server is outdated, firmware can no longer be updated and the server cannot be expanded to provide more storage capacity. These shortcomings leave the system vulnerable to critical performance issues.

Ailport said the system is limping along by purging old email files, a less than ideal situation due to the Freedom of Information Act, but it is the only way they can create space to allow new emails to come in.

According to Ailport, over Christmas break the server went down for four days and during that time, any emails sent to the city were lost and unrecoverable. She also pointed out that if the firmware breaks, there’s no fixing it and all files will be lost permanently.

All council members expressed concern about the budget for the project, although Ailport pointed out that paying for the new Office 365 system would be a lump sum rather than spaced out like the current system.

The council decided to table the issue until the City Administrator and Clerk could provide more information on available moneys.