Annual meeting and engineering report

The HWUA has set the date, time and location for the annual meeting of the Association membership as shown below. A full agenda will be sent out prior to the meeting

Date:       July 27, 2021

Time:       10:00AM -12:00PM

Location: The Hondius Room at the Estes Park Library

Since our last meeting, the Board has been working to find alternatives to improvements to our water system since the deal with the Town collapsed.  To that end, we contracted with Landmark Engineering to do a preliminary engineering study of various options for replacing parts or all of the seasonal system.  We are providing all of you a copy here so you have a chance to review it in advance of the meeting.

The attached preliminary engineering study prepared by Landmark EPC addresses these options, including a plan to add a new water tank for the Hondius water system above Upper Tanager Road so that the old tanks in Rocky Mountain National Park could be abandoned.  While the lease with the Park has been extended for a period of up to ten years, given the age of the tanks, possible water leakage, etc., the Board obtained the study from Landmark to determine the cost of such a project.  The Landmark report includes several cost estimates as follows:

1.  Replace the tanks with a new tank with the pipe connecting tank and main line buried at a shallow depth, consistent with the rest of the seasonal system (See Attachment “A-2 Minimum” in the attached Landmark report – Total cost estimate of $522,776), 

2.  Tank replacement as in 1. above, but with the pipe buried at a depth to allow year-round use, if the seasonal system is ever replaced with a deeper main line (See Attachment “A-1 Minimum” – $631,893), 

3.  Tank replacement as in 1. above with the main line of the seasonal system replaced with the new main lines buried for seasonal use only (See Attachment A-2 – $921,567),

4.  Tank replacement as in 2. above with the main line of the seasonal system replaced with the main line buried for year-round use (See Attachment A-1 – $1,362,575).

Unfortunately the cost of the tank replacement is still significant and with 70 current Hondius members, if all participated the minimal cost of even the least expensive plan would be approximately $7,500 per member.  Additionally, all members are responsible for their own service lines and if a plan were implemented to replace the seasonal system with a year-round system, all members wishing to also convert to year-round use would have to ensure that their service lines are buried to adequate depth to do so, likely requiring replacement of their current service line with a deeper line.  The cost for this conversion would depend on the length of your service line, as the main line would continue to be near its current location.  I believe in the past we had estimated the cost to replace these service lines would run in the $20-30 range per foot.

The Hondius Board recently applied for a grant with the State of Colorado for up to $400,000 for a tank replacement project but we were informed on June 17th that Hondius will not receive the grant requested and that applications for projects totaling $63 million had been received by the State while the amount of grant money available was only $4.7 million.

If you are unable to attend the meeting, you are welcome to provide your thoughts by replying to this email.  Thank you, and we hope to see you at the annual meeting.

Don Piepgras

President

Hondius Water Users Assn.