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Brookings utility board reports on rates, water projects, broadband and solar timeline
Summary
The Brookings Municipal Utilities board presented a year-in-review and operational updates including a wastewater rate study, a solar farm timeline, lead-service-line removals, water-plant construction schedule, and broadband/FCC reporting plans; no council action was taken.
The Brookings City Council received a report from Brookings Municipal Utilities (BMU) summarizing 2024 highlights and several ongoing projects, from a wastewater rate study to broadband reporting obligations.
The BMU presentation reviewed a wastewater cost-of-service rate study that outlined options for setting wastewater rates for different customer classes; no rate changes or formal action were taken. BMU also reported electric reliability data from the American Public Power Association showing a low number of outages and short average outage durations compared with regional peers.
BMU said a community solar farm is expected to be operational by fall 2025 and that a recently renovated power station at 30 Fourth Avenue completed interior work in 2024. Automated metering deployment finished in 2024 with about 99% of meters now read remotely, the report said.
On water projects, BMU described the new water treatment plant as “substantially completed” and able to begin operation by October 2025, with final interior and landscaping work to be finished by May 2026. The board reported work on removing known lead service lines; the presentation included repeated figures about removals in 2024 (the speaker said both “47 have been removed” and “46 of them in 2024,” adding that 32 were done by contractors and 15 by BMU). The report also noted that roughly 1,600,000 gallons of water were used fighting a recent downtown fire and that combined flow from pumps reached about 5,000 gallons per minute.
BMU also reviewed telecommunications developments. Swiftel completed a new communications tower on Sixth Street, is working to raise service for locations below minimum FCC-required speeds and will report measured internet speeds to the FCC. BMU said it is exploring 10-gigabit broadband in some larger apartment buildings. A New Year’s Eve incident in which a privately owned bus damaged fiber and copper facilities left 19 homes and 12 businesses without service; service was restored the same evening.
No council action was requested or taken on the BMU report.
The BMU presentation covered matters that affect electric and water reliability, broadband access and future customer charges; councilmembers asked follow-up questions but did not direct immediate policy changes.
