A small Dallas County town is a recipient of federal funds to make a necessary upgrade in one of its infrastructure.

Iowa’s Third Congressional District Representative Zach Nunn made a presentation to the city of Minburn of $2 million to help completely replace the community’s entire water system. He said that the initial funding is from the Capital Projects Fund that allows for investments in a wide variety of projects including updating public facilities and infrastructure. 

Minburn Mayor Joe Stuetelberg said after spending two days going door to door to every home in the community, just about everyone is in favor of replacing the town’s original water system that was installed in the 1950s. He pointed out that there are smaller diameter water mains and service lines that do not have fire flow capabilities or loops which also causes low water pressure.

“So like we can’t fill a fire truck, for instance, in town without somebody else maybe lose pressure at their house. So we just need a whole new system and the engineers have told us unfortunately they can’t just like piece different parts together because it would cause worse effects to other parts of the town, like more breaks and lower pressure. We have to replace the whole thing. It’s all been pieced together with like repairs and stuff over the years. So we just need to kind of start fresh, basically.”    

Nunn appreciated how well the Minburn community came together to apply for this federal funding to help jumpstart their improvements.

“And it’s really been a reflection of a public-private partnership here that made this (funding) successful. And where Minburn really stood out is just the heart and soul that they brought to this fight when they made this request of having a vision of where they want to see their community to continue to grow, right here kind of in the orbit of the (Des Moines) metro area but still retaining it’s rural community sense of purpose.”   

Stuetelberg added that they are trying to get an additional $3.5 million to be able to upgrade the entire system, while also applying for other state grants and trying not to do more increases in water rates for the community members.