Quincy Council OKs third detective

QUINCY — The Quincy City Council on Tuesday unanimously approved hiring a third detective, replacing a currently unfilled school resource officer position.

According to Police Chief Kieth Siebert, the Quincy School District has decided not to keep the second resource officer position.

The third detective would specialize in street crimes such as burglaries, graffiti and thefts, but would also be assigned to help with major crime investigations and federal anti-drug efforts.

“It would be nice to have street-level intel,” Siebert said. “This is much needed and he would definitely be overworked.”

Siebert said the new detective would be hired internally. Currently, the Quincy Police are now fully staffed, with 20 officers as well as Siebert and Capt. Ryan Green, both Grant County Sheriff’s Office veterans who oversee the department.

The Quincy School District currently pays for the one full-time school resource officer, Siebert said, and has had a second position open but unfilled for more than a year.

“It isn’t staffed anyway,” he added.

“Our goal is that during the day shift, every officer will spend some time at a school, walk through, talk to kids,” Siebert said. “We’ll still be covering the schools.”

The city council also approved $450,000 for engineering and design on a test well that would allow the city to store and recover water from its industrial waster water treatment system.

Kevin Lindsey, a hydrologist with Portland, Ore.,-based Northwest Groundwater Services, told the city council that it will cost about $1.2 million to drill the test well, with around $600,000 coming from the Washington Department of Ecology.

The well will allow Quincy to pump treated industrial wastewater into a deep portion of the Grand Ronde aquifer to see if the process will work as a permanent storage option.

Quincy, with the help of industrial customer Microsoft, has been creating an extensive system to treat and reuse industrial wastewater.

Treated water pumped into the aquifer, about 800 feet down, would displace the water already in the aquifer and would likely not have any serious effects on other users, since most wells are not drilled that deep in that portion of Grant County, Lindsey said.

“This will require more testing that as new well, to make sure what we get back is what the utility wants to use,” he explained.

If the test well works, the city would then drill a permanent storage well, which would have to be operational by September, 2022, when the Bureau of Reclamation demands Quincy stop dumping treated waste water in the West Canal.

“If this doesn’t work, you have lots of lead time to find another solution,” Lindsey said.

However, Lindsey was enthusiastic. A lot of places with subsurface geology like Quincy’s have made aquifer recharge work.

“This should work,” he said.

Using the lower reaches of the aquifer is considerably less costly than above ground storage — either tanks or a pond — Lindsey said. And it has the potential of at some point of allowing the city to put more water into the aquifer than it pumps out.

“One of the goals is aquifer restoration, and that’s important,” he said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.