During Thursday’s Odessa Development Corporation (ODC) meeting Odessa Mayor Javier Joven made an urgent plea to the ODC Board to consider ways ODC can use its current fund balance of over $50 million to aid the City in the replacement of aged critical infrastructure.
“The current City Council inherited twenty years of infrastructure neglect and we have to move now and move urgently to address our most critical needs,” said Joven in a statement to Odessa Headlines. “I want to be clear that we aren’t finger pointing but the facts are the facts and it’s up to this Council to ensure we address the water and sewer problems we have and not kick the can down the road any longer. Repairs and upgrades are already underway at both the water treatment plant and the sewer treatment plant but a lot more work is going to have to be done.”
Joven’s request comes on the heels of another city wide water outage that occurred last week. The latest outage was due to another break in the main line on 42nd Street and repairs were exacerbated by valves that were frozen and couldn’t be worked to isolate the problem.
Because Joven’s comments came during the public comment on non-agenda items portion of the meeting ODC Board members were not able to directly respond to Joven’s request but after the meeting ODC Board President Kris Crow told Odessa Headlines “I believe the ODC Board is ready and willing to quickly explore ways that we can put ODC’s money to work to benefit of our community. There is no doubt that the loss of water service impacted local businesses and damaged our economy. ODC’s mandate is to spur economic growth and development and reliable water and sewer service is an essential element of being able to support and attract local businesses.”
Crow continued, “As a matter of fact ODC Vice President Jeff Russell reached out to Representative Landgraf earlier this week to arrange a meeting where we could explore what funds ODC could legally provide to help with our infrastructure needs. I have been in discussions with the ODC attorney to determine to what extent and how quickly we could fund some critical infrastructure projects such as the replacement of the entire 42nd Street main line. We will be moving with urgency to work with Mayor Joven and the City Council to rapidly develop some solutions.”