The Odessa City Council approved a multimillion dollar investment to update and repair the community’s water system.
On Tuesday, the council allocated $25 million to replace major water lines and valves across the city — a response to the major leaks and citywide water outages that have plagued the city in recent years.
“We have an aging water infrastructure in Odessa that we’ve neglected for decades,” said Odessa Mayor Javier Joven in a press release. “Not taking action simply isn’t an option.”
Odessa City Manager John Beckmeyer first brought forward the two-part plan last week during a council work session. He said, the first step is installing new valves across the city’s water system, which will help isolate leaks.
According to Beckmeyer, decrepit valves have made it impossible at times to prevent leaks from causing large sections of the city to lose running water — which has also led to boil water notices.
“One of the valves we pulled out was 74 years old,” he said. “So we're dealing with an aging infrastructure that has been somewhat neglected over the last few decades, and it's time to replace it.”
The $25 million will go towards replacing 171 valves that are “inoperable” as well as the project’s second step, replacing approximately 17,000 feet of pipe that make up two major water lines in the city.
Beckmeyer expects it will take around a year to finish replacing the valves.
According to the city, these projects will have no effect on taxpayers. Beckmeyer said the funds were drawn from pre-existing bonds as well as revenue generated from the city selling its wastewater to a local oil and gas company.
Odessa officials are still looking at other infrastructure projects that will help prevent water outages in the future, but Beckmeyer said this $25 million investment “will take us a long ways in the right direction.”
