Never An Answer… Only Excuses
A Letter To The Editor: Now that the city is moving forward on switching to rural water, there is nothing more critical on the city’s agenda than to maintain the safety and quality of our current system until that process is completed. There is nothing more critical than protecting the health of anyone who happens to drink from a tap in Wessington Springs.
Oversight of the operations of this city has been consistently noted as an unobtainable goal on each and every audit, with the lame excuse being that we do not have enough employees to carry out the task. However, something as important as a state-required, monthly E-Coli test should not be too difficult to follow through, from employees to supervisor - to Finance Officer - to Counselors - to Mayor. That is five layers of oversight that were neglected in a single month. Neglect to submit this water test was not noticed by the employee’s supervisor, by THREE office personnel, not even at the monthly council meeting by way of department report or questioned by the mayor of his own committee responsible for the water department whose employees were in transition at the time. We, the taxpayers, are paying very generous salaries at each level of city employee and elected officials to cover ZERO oversight. This is not the first time a lack of oversight has cost the taxpayers of Wessington Springs, as we can all remember the expense caused by the neglect in reading and recording utility bills a few years ago. No outcome was ever reported to the taxpayers regarding that debacle. Nothing was done then to create a level of oversight, as is evident with this current most serious error, risking the health of each and every resident.
A simple question during each City Council meeting water department report as to the results of the monthly water test is obviously too much to expect for the more than $1.5M we spend annually on city salaries, benefits, overtime and don’t forget bonuses.
Excuses and blame were plentiful in the newspaper article, but no one offered a clear step forward to avoid a repeat of this error, so I will. As long as E-Coli is even a hint of a possibility in our drinking water, we all need to see the state’s measured level of this contagion in the monthly minutes.
The voice of Wessington Springs is YOU.
Kathy Voorhees
Wessington Springs, SD