At Tuesday night’s Virgin Valley Water District meeting, Morris Peacock with Hinton Burdick CPA & Advisors presented his findings from a financial audit for the past fiscal year ending June 30. Overall, the district has made a financial improvement with their first year of financial realization since implementing the debt reduction fee of $10 that each water user pays on a monthly basis. With that fee, the district has been able to pay down its outstanding bond debt by approximately $2 million in the past year alone, according to Board President Nephi Julien.
Because of the financial soundness of the VVWD, Peacock noted to the board that “there are no material deficiencies” found. With that, “we didn’t issue any formal findings and recommendations to you because your internal controls are great, you have a great staff and we didn’t find a lot of inconsistencies that we typically find,” he told the board.
On other business, the board awarded a bid for the Well 27A project to Hydro Water Resources, with an official bid of just over $1.17 million. The project, slated for this year, will include demolition of Well 27 and an installation of Well 27A. Layne Christensen, a contractor who has a long project history with the district, would have been the lowest bidder at just over $819,000 but was unresponsive when given an addendum, thus disqualifying them from the project. Hydro Resources also has a history with the district having also drilled and installed Well 1A in Bunkerville.
For his manager’s report, District Manager Kevin Brown commented on the water main break from Monday and noted to the board that the incident could have been much worse. “We only lost 210,000 gallons of water and had low pressure restored to the residents within 30 minutes,” he told the board. “Also, repairs only cost us about $10,000. This easily could have cost us $200,000 or more had it involved asphalt.”
With that incident, bringing a redundant line to the northwest area of Mesquite is still a main focus. However, as board Vice President Barbara Ellestad mentioned of an email sent to Brown on Monday, “having a redundant line would not have made a difference” due to the location of the failure. That finding has led staff and Brown to take another look at the path in which they bring in the redundant line and tank to the Sun City area before meeting with Pulte and Mesquite Investors on Nov. 11. At that time, they will continue negotiations and specifics on the proposed project.
