Blanding infrastructure growing to meet future growth

by Buckley Jensen

With the start of milling on April 30 at the Dennison Mines’ White Mesa Mill six miles south of Blanding, (see May 7 SJR) the future of Blanding may have never looked brighter.

City leaders are scrambling to stay ahead of the anticipated growth which the Dennison operations and other economic stimuli in the County have wrought.

Several large projects currently in the works are as follows:

Bids will be let within a week for a new $250,000, three-bay addition to the fire station.

Bids will be let within two weeks for a new $1,700,000 water treatment plant. This state-of-the-art micro-filtration facility will be designed to treat three million gallons of water a day. Blanding’s average daily use at the present time is half that amount.

Blanding City Manager Chris Webb said that the Federal Government will soon be enacting more stringent water purification standards across the country and this new plant will not only increase the quality of city water, but will make meeting the new federal standards easier.

The old water treatment plant will be kept as a backup. The new plant is designed to be easily expanded to meet future needs and will have a life of at least 40 years.

Within two weeks, the city will bid out a $1,400,000 contract to install 15,000 feet of eight inch pipe from the deep wells south of the city to the water system.

When completed, this system will take water out of the deep wells and deliver it directly to the city system, bypassing the treatment plant because the deep well water needs no treatment of any kind. This project is partially funded with a $600,000 grant from the Army Corps of Engineers.

A $750,000 contract was recently awarded to the J. B. Excavating Company of Herriman, UT. This project starts the citywide master plan for storm water removal. This phase will install large concrete culverts. When the master plan is completed, it will assure that flooding and free standing water problems which now exist in the city limits will be mitigated or eliminated.

For you who don’t get particularly “jazzed” about news of buildings, water and pipes, how about this next project? For the past 11 years the city has been planning and saving to build a huge recreational facility on land between the current baseball complex and the new hospital.

This multi-million dollar project will include four full-sized basketball courts, a new swimming pool, weight room, dance studio, dressing rooms and storage areas.

The plans and drawings are very impressive. Since final funding is not yet completed, city fathers are still a bit reticent to say much, but the project is entering its final phase. This project may go to bid within a year, perhaps sooner.

Many exciting projects are on the drawing boards in all of the communities in San Juan County. We will highlight some of them in future articles.