WINCHESTER - After two years of severe city water restrictions because of failing wells that forced people to let their lawns go brown and gardens dry up, the city of Winchester hired two well witches.

"The residents really have a lot of faith in well witches," said City Clerk LeAnn Trautman. "They both found water in the canyon outside of town on privately owned property. But there's no negotiating going on because we don't have any money to do negotiating or anything else."

Winchester is among a number of small towns in the area that are facing major infrastructure upgrades or repairs because of aging or failing systems. And yet, with stricter federal requirements for water and sewer plants, as well as declining populations and a smaller tax base, the towns have daunting challenges to pay for them.

Grant money is getting harder to come by, said Kelly Dahlquist of the Clearwater Economic Development Association in Lewiston. The maximum allocation of federal grants was recently reduced from $500,000 per award to $350,000.

"From what we were told at (Idaho Department of) Commerce, there were two reasons they changed the allocation," Dahlquist said.

"They had so many applicants that they thought they could spread that money over a larger pool of awards. And the second reason was to put some extra funding back into their job creation program."

So how has that worked out?

"Well, it put a big burden back onto these small communities," Dahlquist said. "In communities like Grangeville or Orofino, where they've got more population to offset, that $150,000 it's not as bad, but like Winchester, that $150,000 (reduction in grant award) is a big expense. So it has been a challenge."

Winchester recently received a $37,500 planning grant through the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality to begin looking for water, but that won't touch the cost of building new wells.

The city council recently approved running a bond election Nov. 5 for $1.1 million. The bond must pass by a simple majority.

Because grants are usually contingent upon matching funds, Trautman said passing the bond is critical if the town has even a prayer of getting the money to cover the $3.2 million total cost of building a new well.

"From what we're hearing, if we got everything we believe we could get, the match would be 65 percent," Trautman said. "But we need our bond money to make that happen so if the bond doesn't fly, we can't do that."

Sometimes the burden of upgrading systems is not caused so much by infrastructure failure as tighter emissions standards imposed by federal regulatory agencies.

Grangeville recently completed the first phase of an $8.1 million wastewater treatment plant that Mayor Bruce Walker said was totally unnecessary but the city was forced to comply with Environmental Protection Agency guidelines.

"Part of the problem with the wastewater treatment plant is (EPA) made these rules that are just impossible to comply with, with the funds that you have," Walker said. "You can't do what EPA wants you to do with the funds that are available through just normal user fees."

Jim Werntz, director of the EPA Idaho operations office at Boise, acknowledged that it's expensive for many cities to comply with stricter emissions standards. But assistance is available through the clean water state revolving fund, and Werntz said about $100 million from that fund has been distributed to cities in Idaho over the past 10 years.

And while it's true that the water treatment plants cities have used for a few decades may be in good shape, Werntz said the issue is that federal clean water standards have been revised and the plants may no longer meet the new levels, nor be able to deal with some cities' growing populations.

"We're dealing with this all over the state," Werntz said. "When you discharge to a water (such as a stream or river) you have to make sure that you're not adding pollution that would make the water body get worse. We write those permits to meet state requirements, which are written to be consistent with the Clean Water Act. Sometimes those requirements cause communities to have upgrades and that costs money."

Grangeville obtained a handful of different grants and also passed a $3.5 million bond two years ago to pay for the system.

Walker said there was no problem with the old wastewater plant.

"Our theory was we weren't discharging into (Three Mile Creek) enough to make any difference," Walker said. "The fish were there before; they're there now. But they made us comply with this ridiculous level of phosphorous (emissions) so we needed this plant."

The city tried to fight it. Walker said Grangeville hired an attorney from Boise thinking "we could spend a large amount of money on attorney fees and come out ahead, and it didn't work."

He said seeking help from federal representatives also was ineffective because they have "no authority of EPA. None. Zero."

Walker said the city tried to persuade EPA officials to visit Grangeville and look at how well the old system was performing, but in the end the city was found to be out of compliance with federal regulations and huge fines were threatened.

"We were in violation for over a year and a half," Walker said, "but once they saw we were making progress toward getting it fixed they let us go. These problems are made by unfunded mandates, a lot of them."

CEDA's Dahlquist agreed.

"The problem isn't that (cities' infrastructure systems) are aging and not working because everybody's done a pretty good job of maintaining," she said. "But EPA's regulations, that is what's driving a lot of these projects. Cities are facing these regulations and they've got to make the fixes or get fined and a lot of times, the first fine might be $3,500 or $5,000 but the next one will be considerably higher. So everybody's got to at least start planning to make these changes."

A few years ago the town of Riggins, with its population of about 400, came up with a novel way to pay for its sewer renovation.

Because the town is heavily dependent upon tourism, it passed in 2006 a 2 percent local option tax on lodging, prepared meal sales and alcohol by the drink. The tax collects about $60,000 a year, $50,000 of which pays for the 20-year general obligation bond on the water system.

The remaining $10,000 of the tax goes toward other city projects, such as a recent remodeling of the Odd Fellows hall into a community center and repair of the irrigation flumes.

"We were lucky that we fit the criteria of a destination resort city because recreation is your big business here," said June Whitten, former city clerk.

"Normally water and sewer improvements are usually paid by user fees, but when you're talking (about) fixing up a sewer treatment plant, you're talking millions and dividing it between 400 people. That's a lot of money."

Whitten pointed out that small cities have to comply with the same regulations as larger cities "but we have much fewer people to divide the costs to.

"It's going to be very difficult. I think the water and sewer facilities are going to be hit the hardest because they're so expensive to put in. Everybody has always relied on federal grants to put those in."