Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation officials say dozens of villages are in line for new water and sewer systems.
A “honeybucket lagoon,” a disposal site for the bagged human waste that is collected from village residents, is seen on Sept. 2, 2021, in Teller, an Inupiat village in the Bering Strait region. Teller, with about 250 people, lacks piped-water service, so residents use honeybuckets as toilets. Teller is one of the 31 villages classified as “unserved” for water and sanitation needs.
“I think the biggest barrier right now is a clear path for the communities to be sustainable once the infrastructure is built,” she said. If not addressed now, communities wind up with systems they cannot afford to operate or maintain, she said. “How can we move forward and be a partner in this effort to support the communities without hanging them out to dry, then?”
For the state budget starting in July, $222 million is expected from the federal government, most of which is from the Indian Health Service, a major recipient of Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funds, according to the department’sat the hearing. Gov. Mike Dunleavy, in his capital budget, proposed $25 million in state money, a sum that is intended as the state’s match for Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Agriculture funding, Bohan said.
“We have 40-year-old systems that have had little maintenance or are constructed of materials that are no longer really appropriate and are breaking down, such as Unalakleet,” she said, referring to an ongoing project that is developing a new water source and replacing an old water-distribution system that routinely fails: “So there might be a resolution to the unserved communities, but this is an ongoing process well beyond the infrastructure funding to help these communities maintain the...
There are two pending bills that are aimed at making it easier for communities to get Village Safe Water funding., would potentially bypass the state’s longstanding system of using scores to weigh community needs and capacity.
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