City of San Juan, Texas Water Tower Maintenance

San Juan, TX –  “Water is the lifeblood of any community. Without water, you don’t have a community. I’m sorry if you don’t have a viable source of water, not only a viable source of water but an actual clean source of water, your community will fail. It is just the way it is,” said San Juan Utilities Director David Salinas.

“You can’t sustain life, you can’t sustain a community, you can’t sustain a business, you can’t sustain growth without a safe, reliable source of water,” said Salinas.

“What caught me right away is that the City of San Juan has two towers, elevated storage tanks, that hadn’t been maintained since the ’80s, maybe in the ’90s, but nobody could really tell me when was the last time they got painted,” said Salinas. “They had already been issued a Notice of Violation from the State on the fact that the towers were pretty beat-up and they needed to get some maintenance done.”

In the Maguire Iron program you pay a small amount on an annual basis, you know, your annual fee and you do it over a five or ten year period, whatever the contract was. We did a five-year period to maintain the towers,” said Salinas.

It is hard, from other municipalities that I worked for, it’s hard to convince the City Council or City Commission or even the administrative guy to upfront a quarter of a million to a half-million dollars to paint an elevated storage tank,” said Salinas. “I mean, all Councils, my boss, the City Manager, all administration, they love when they know what the cost is. They hate when there are surprises.”

“This is not a surprise. They know this year is this much, next year is this much and the year after that is this much,” said Salinas. “There have always been the cases when you have a project, you have a cost estimate that the engineer gave you six months ago, or a year ago and then when you go out to bid it everything has changed and now you don’t have enough money in the budget to do it. This way it’s there. It’s guaranteed. I pay on an annual basis and we’re good to go.”

“Because I have a contract the Commission understands, “Hey we need to fund that.” The other thing I like is that at some point if the city ops, “Hey, we don’t want to continue this.” We pay Maguire Iron for everything they’ve done out to that deal and the rest, whatever has been done, we’re not on the hook for it,” said Salinas. “This is amazing for San Juan!”