Both Cities Cut Driggs Lift Station Fix

DRIGGS — The Driggs City Council voted 2-1 Monday to defer written consent for a batch of Victor sewer connections, citing a Driggs lift station running at 98% of capacity. That station has been at or over its capacity threshold since at least February 2025, when consulting engineers put a $6.4 million fix for it in Victor's capital plan.

Six months later Victor withdrew the fix. Its consultant wrote that Victor was building a treatment plant of its own, so the station would no longer be near capacity. The same firm wrote Driggs' plan, and it reached the same conclusion about the pipe downstream.

Victor abandoned that plant on July 1, and neither city has put the projects back in its plans.

The station

Driggs owns South Lift Station, which handles everything Victor sends north.

Its firm capacity is 600 gallons per minute. Firm capacity is the station's rating with one pump out of service, the standard Idaho holds lift stations to. Modeled peak inflow is 590 gallons per minute, or 98% of that rating, leaving 10 gallons per minute of margin. Translated into houses, Driggs' engineers put the headroom at 32 equivalent residential units.

Of sixteen lift stations in Driggs, it is the only one whose peak inflow tops 85% of firm capacity. That 85% line is stricter than state code requires. The engineers set it to leave the city time to act before a station runs out of room.

Staff told the council Monday that the Victor connections at issue amount to about 604 units. No unit count appears anywhere in the written packet.

What Victor's engineers wanted

Victor commissioned Keller Associates to write its wastewater facility planning study, delivered in February 2025. The plan's first-priority list, the work it dated 2025 to 2030, put two projects at the Driggs lift station.

The first was $2,735,000 to upgrade the station itself. The second was $3,654,000 to upsize the force main it pumps into, because moving more sewage through that pipe would push flow velocities past the limit the engineers set. Both were triggered by existing conditions, not future growth.

Those two projects sat in Victor's capital plan, not Driggs'. A footnote to the table reads that first-priority projects "include projects that will likely be cost shared with the City of Driggs."

What Victor withdrew

In August 2025 Keller filed an amendment to that study. Victor had decided to build its own treatment plant, and the amendment revised the recommendations to match.

On the lift station: "The Driggs South Lift Station currently handles all of Victor's flows. Upon completion of the new treatment plant, The City of Victor's flows will go to the treatment plant instead of through the Driggs South Lift Station. Without Victor's flows, the lift station will no longer be approaching its firm capacity. As such, improvements to this lift station are not recommended at this time."

On the force main: "Because it is no longer recommended to upsize the Driggs South Lift Station, the force main improvements will not be needed and are no longer recommended."

Both projects came off Victor's list.

What Driggs planned

Keller also wrote Driggs' collection system plan, finalized in December 2025 and approved by the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality on April 17.

Driggs' plan programs $406,000 to upsize the station's pumps to 700 gallons per minute, enough to move the peak flow arriving today. On the force main it recommends nothing, "because flows will substantially decrease after Victor's flows are no longer conveyed."

The force main is an 8-inch pipe running 6,840 feet, rated to carry 1,250 gallons per minute. But Main, South and Creekside lift stations all pump into that one pipe, and the plan notes that when all three run at once, South Lift Station's capacity drops to 250 gallons per minute, against a peak inflow of 590. Bigger pumps do not resolve that. The plan says a force main serving South alone would prevent the reduction, and does not schedule one.

What it would cost

Driggs has $406,000 programmed, in the 2025 to 2030 window, to upsize the pumps. That figure assumes Victor's flows are leaving.

Victor withdrew $6,389,000 in August 2025, the Driggs lift station upgrade and the force main upsize together, sized to carry Victor's growth for twenty years.

Neither city's plan prices a dedicated force main for South.

Driggs does carry $1,564,000 to abandon Main Lift Station and replace it with gravity sewer, which would take one of the three pumps off the shared main. The plan justifies that project on its own terms, to resolve surcharging at Main, and pairs it with $305,000 of work at Huntsman Lagoon to absorb the redirected flow.

Both premises expired

In May 2026 the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality approved a treatment plant sized for Driggs alone, then rescinded that approval seven days later, citing the unsettled legal status of the 2011 agreement under which Driggs treats Victor's sewage.

On June 16 the Driggs council voted 4-0 to design the rebuilt plant for both cities across a 20-year horizon. Public Works Director Jay Mazalewski put the question to the council himself: "Do we include or exclude the city of Victor service area?"

Two weeks later Victor dropped its petition to court-finance a plant of its own, on the reasoning that a plant built for both left it no reason to build one. Its agreement to send sewage to Driggs runs to at least 2031, with two five-year extensions available at Victor's option.

The assumption underneath both plans was that Victor's flows would stop arriving. Neither plan has been revised since.

Monday

The request in front of the council came from Victor Public Works Director Nate Beard in an email dated May 7, asking Driggs to "ratify the making of these connections" for developments over ten units. Section 5 of the 2011 agreement requires written consent from both cities for any single connection above that threshold, and adds that consent "shall not be unreasonably withheld."

Mazalewski's staff report gave the same reason for the missing analysis. "Additional analysis of the S. Lift Station and associated piping upgrades were not conducted, as Victor notified Driggs that they will be disconnecting from the trunkline."

City attorney Sam Angell told the council the contract pointed the other way. "The language is something to the effect of will not be unreasonably withheld," he said. "And so the staff's recommendation, including mine, is that we should approve these connections."

Council member Sarah Johnston argued against deferring. "I really think it would be bad precedent for us to deny any requests to connect," she said. "That could very quickly escalate into a moratorium situation."

Council member Miles Knowles moved to table. "I would move to table the approval of written consent to Victor until the following information is received," he said. "Is Victor still leaving the system? If so, when? And how many of these 604 units are built or in the process of being built?"

Knowles's first motion also sought what upgrades the trunk line needs, when they should happen, and how the costs are allocated between the cities. He polled Jason Popilsky on that section, got agreement that it was too specific, and dropped it, "given where the negotiations and discussions are between the cities."

It passed 2-1, Johnston opposed. Council President Allison Michalski was absent, so a single dissent was enough to produce that margin. No motion to deny was made.

The motion does not say how the questions reach Victor. Knowles said he expected the joint meetings to carry them. "Hopefully they realize that this is, you know, in regards to them leaving the system or not, it's a question that we have been asking them for a very long time now," he said. "It's of pretty urgent necessity for the city of Driggs, and I think hopefully they'll be able to give us some indication on that in our future meeting that we have coming up."

What nobody has counted

Mazalewski told the council the station has not failed. "Currently we haven't seen any backups or sanitary sewer flows at our South Lift Station," he said, adding that continued growth would eventually change that.

"What we really should be doing is updating our collections capital facility plan for the 20-year forecast," he said, "and understanding what we need to do."

The 32 units of headroom is a modeled figure from a study finalized in December, and connections made since then are flow the model does not carry.

The 604 units range from developments that have not broken ground to buildings that are finished or nearly so. Some are already connected, and Beard's email asked Driggs to ratify them.

What to watch: Whether either city programs the Driggs lift station upgrades now that Victor is staying, and how far along the 604 units are. The two councils are scheduled to meet jointly on September 16.

Both Cities Stopped Planning to Fix the Driggs Lift Station That Carries Victor's Sewage