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Chapter 53
Don Kutzley kept a scanner going in his office, not because he was any particular fan of the Spearfish Lake Police, but as city manager, he needed a way of keeping a finger on what the police department was up to. He heard the call, "Base, Six-Two out on a traffic
stop," but it didn't have any particular significance; he never gave it a second thought. His attention was more on the mail, anyway.
There was always a wad of mail, some days worse than others, and a fair amount of it came with his name on it, so he couldn't leave it to the office girls to go through.
This Friday, though, the mail wasn't too bad, but it had already brought bad news. The first letter he'd opened was from the Farm Home Administration, giving flat denial to the request for assistance with construction of the storm sewer separation; there wasn't even
a suggestion to reapply at a later date. That was fast work on the part of Farm Home; he hadn't expected a reply, good or bad, for at least another six months. Don had already made a note to bring it to Council the next Tuesday night, and council wasn't going to be very pleased.
It sure would be nice to finesse this one, some how or other, he thought. A big project, successfully funded and completed, would look real good on the resume, and it wasn't too soon to be thinking about getting a few out.
Kutzley wasn't a Spearfish Lake native; he was from Nebraska, in fact, and his last job had been as assistant city manager and city treasurer of Clearwater, Florida. Once, he'd wanted to be a politican, run for office, but back when he couldn't even get elected to
student council in high school, he'd realized that being an elected official was a precarious way to make a living, at best. Still, he'd had a real interest in government, so had taken to public administration, instead. It had proven to be the right choice for him; it provided most of the
joys of being a politican, but few of the pitfalls.
To Don, Spearfish Lake wasn't a lot different from Clearwater, from Muscatine. They were still all small towns, and they all took a bit of learning. There was a hidden power structure, no matter what the voters said; every town had a couple of loudmouthed old
women that came to all the council meeting and bitched ignorantly about everything that happened; any town like Spearfish Lake had their own agenda, one where government was rarely high on the list, except maybe when tax time rolled around, but most of the time it was easier
to get up a discussion about football than it was to come up with one on property tax equalization.
Don could take football or leave it, but he preferred to leave it. Though he stood six foot three, and weighed over 300 pounds, he'd never played football in his life, at least since throwing a ball around on an elementary school playground. It was, at best, rather primitive
and brutal, and there were more important things to do.
He brushed back a hair on his prematurely balding head, and opened the next letter.
It was from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and it was short:
"Having received no public comment, or request for public hearing, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hereby declares an area within a radius of ten miles from the city of Spearfish Lake, including the city of Spearfish Lake, as an interim critical interest area for the
species nathrex sipendon gibsoni, Gibson's Water Snake."
Sheer gibberish, as far as Kutzley was concerned. What did that have to do with anything?
He reached for the next letter. It was from the Environmental Protection Agency, and that was hardly ever good news.
It wasn't. It was hardly longer than the letter from the Fish and Wildlife Service, but Kutzley understood what this one meant, every word. This would have to go to council, too, and council wouldn't be pleased, one bit.
His attention was drawn by a knock on his open door, and a deep voice that could only be Jack Musgrave's: "You in for me, chief?"
"Yeah, sure," Kutzley said in a grinding, high-pitched voice. "How's things down at the plant?"
"Oh, pretty good," Musgrave replied. "We steam-cleaned the basement yesterday afternoon, and it's not too bad in there, now."
Ninety-nine people out of a hundred in Spearfish Lake would have said that Jack Musgrave probably had the most disgusting job in town, running the waste water treatment plant. Actually, most of the time, it wasn't bad at all. When the plant ran smoothly, which it
usually did, it mostly consisted of puttering around. While most people had the impression that it was rather worse than working in a manure pile, it was usually clean and sparkling. There was a slight smell, but one you didn't notice after a few minutes -- except when the plant
overflowed, like it usually did after a heavy rain. The overflow was always confined to the basement, and when the plant overflowed and filled the basement in the summer, it did tend to reek a bit until the basement was steam cleaned. Steam cleaning took a nasty couple of hours,
but Musgrave never let it get out of hand.
"What's on your mind today?" the city manager asked.
"Got some good news, for once," Musgrave reported. "We're going to have the crew down here first of the week, to run the TV rat through the sewers. Going to get the whole system done, and have a few bucks left over in the budget."
"It seems to me council only gave you four grand for that, and it was going to cost twelve something. How'd you pull that off?"
"Got lucky," Jack reported. "There's this girl from town, here, working on her doctorate, and her project has something to do with snakes living in sewer systems . . ."
"Is that the girl that's been running around town for the last couple of months, sticking a periscope down the storm drains?"
"That's her," Jack replied "She managed to finagle some foundation for ten grand for TV surveillance. When she was trying for it, back last spring, I agreed that I'd come up with a couple grand for local match, and that we'd share the videotapes. So, a couple of
grand, plus a couple of hundred for blank videotapes, and we get a second original of the whole system."
"That's a good deal, even for luck," Kutzley said. "Now, what is it you hope to find?"
"Well, she's hoping to find snakes, obviously," the waste water treatment plant manager reported. "Me, I'm looking for breaks in the system, where storm water is getting into the system where it isn't supposed to. The more of that we can isolate to surface runoff, the
less that we have to run through the plant. Maybe as much as ten percent of what we have to run through the plant after a heavy rain could be coming from breaks like that. That's just a guess; I don't know for sure."
"Yeah, but the system is supposed to carry off storm water," Kutzley said. "Otherwise, it just adds to the flooding problem."
"Some places, but not others," Musgrave replied. "I mean, if it's in a place that it's supposed to be going down to the swamp, and it's getting into the system, instead, we're processing water we don't have to."
Don shook his head; there was no point in bottling up the bad news. "It's probably not going to matter a whole hell of a lot," he said. "It looks like we're going to have to put in the separation project, like it or not."
"How's that?"
"Let me read you this letter from the EPA," he said, picking it up off the desk. "`Under section blah blah blah of the Clean Water Act of 1984, you are hereby informed that as of July 1, 1988, the city of Spearfish Lake will be fined ten thousand dollars per day that the
discharge of the waste water treatment plant is out of compliance with state and federal regulations. As of July 1, 1990, the fine will become twenty thousand dollars per day."
"Ouch."
"Yeah, ouch. And, we just got turned down by Farm Home. I'm not looking forward to Tuesday night."
