Our view: Green River should focus more on waterlines

For the past several years, the waterline on Flaming Gorge Way has broken, resulting in the city spending time and money closing a section of the street, digging up the line and replacing it. Nearby residents and businesses are inconvenienced because their access to water is shut off while city workers fix the problem and

It’s no secret that section of line is old, being made from cast iron. The fact that the line is only 4 inches in diameter is a problem in itself, as the city admits the amount of water it provides isn’t suitable to provide adequate fire flow to give fire fighters the needed volume to fight a fire downtown. However, when you add in the situation with that cast iron line and how brittle it has become in the several decades since it was laid, the question of why something wasn’t done sooner comes to mind.

Yes, we realize the city is working with the Wyoming Department of Transportation to find a solution as Flaming Gorge Way is part of the Wyoming Highway System. Yet, this falls into the “too little, too late” category of planning as the age of that portion of waterline is well known and documented. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that those breaks are happening.

Our fear is this: they’re only going to happen more frequently in the future because money isn’t available locally or from the state to properly replace those lines. This issue is another case of the city kicking a can down the road for someone else to deal with as the money was certainly available in the past. This could have been dealt with during the mid 2000s from the money local governments and state agencies were having surplus budgets from the oil and gas boom. It could have been dealt with during the 2012 sixth penny improvement projects tax. But, it wasn’t.

Now, it’s hard to tell when this problem will be fixed. We’re living at a time when revenue for the city and state are drastically hampered by a crashing energy economy and a global pandemic. Given the makeup of the Wyoming Legislature, we can’t expect WYDOT to come through and help replace Flaming Gorge Way. The city is in a similar situation.

It’s been said that a budget is a list of priorities. We wish the city would have prioritized replacing that waterline earlier. Green River’s residents deserve better infrastructure.