A small town in south-eastern Colorado was recently declared abandoned after all of its local public leaders resigned amid a drinking water supply crisis.
The office of Colorado’s secretary of state, Jena Griswold, announced the fate of Hartman on 29 July, a little more than a month after being advised in writing that the town “had lacked chlorine in its water for [more than] one month and the water was not potable and ‘smells horrible’”, according to public documents.
Hartman resident, landowner and voter Jessie Simmons had also written to Griswold’s office that “the town … had been under an order to boil water for months”, documents said.
The documents added that Hartman “had no board of trustees or town clerk, was unable to hold a [local] election, and owned infrastructure critical for the treatment or delivery of water to residents” that – barring a successful appeal – would become the responsibility of surrounding Prowers county’s government.
Hartman had a population of fewer than 60 at the time of the 2020 US census – before it was declared abandoned under a Colorado state law allowing for the dissolution of incorporated communities which can no longer maintain a government.
Colorado’s Denver Post newspaper described the administrative failure of Hartman as having “no analog in recent state history”.
Developers can throw up a subdivision in a few months that holds well more than 100 people, so the mechanism to fix the water system was always there, there just wasn’t a tax base to pay for it, and apparently no will to take corrective action to fix the systemic issues.
Every state has a federal grant program to fund water system improvements like this (Drinking Water State Revolving Fund). Had their state program considered a project here? Did the regional health department never get involved in a treatment plan? This was a failure on multiple levels.
Yes and the funding was blocked by, you guessed it, Trump.
msn.com
That’s a special earmark project, and yeah we can definitely lay the blame on Trump there.
But there are ongoing programs in every state that could also handle this. Funding has been massively reduced this year, but the program is still active. And since it’s a ‘revolving loan fund’ that means that each state manages a pool of money they loan out for these infrastructure projects, and the interest collected helps fund more projects. The grant money the EPA sends to the states has been slashed two years in a row, meaning that we can’t send out principal forgiveness nearly as much, so localities that can’t pass the credit check won’t be able to use the program.
So yeah, this is likely what happened to Hartman, CO. Very likely this problem could have been addressed/alleviated years ago, but the discussion of fraud is also a huge factor. So like I said, failure on multiple levels.