FAQs

Recycling

  • The Circular Action Alliance (CAA), based in Washington, D.C., is the sole PRO selected by the State of Oregon to manage the recycling responsibilities under the RMA. CAA is responsible for collecting fees from producers, planning and implementing recycling programs, and working with local governments to meet recycling needs.

Search Tips and Tricks

  • Yes.  The website indexes web pages as well as PDFs, Microsoft Office documents, and text documents.

  • No.  By default, the search results will show matches for any word within the phrase.  In this example, you would receive results for all web pages and documents that contained either the word alarm or the word permit or both.

    In order to search on an exact phrase, enclose your search phrase in quotations.  The search results for "alarm permit" will show matches for that exact phrase.

  • Yes.   You can exclude words by using the minus sign (-).   In order to find the results of all pages that have alarm in the result but not permit, you would search for alarm -permit.

Water Service Line Testing

  • The City has hired North Cascade Excavating to perform this work on 350 customers at a cost of $198,715.

  • The EPA has published a goal to require public drinking water providers to replace all water service lines containing lead by 2034.  The results of this inventory will be used by the City to prioritize any future work to replace service lines.

  • The contractor will use appropriate care to ensure minimal disruption to the area necessary to complete the work, and is required to return the area as near as possible to it’s original condition.  The contractor will also be taking “before” and “after” photos of each site.  Impacted properties are encouraged to take their own pictures, with a time/date-stamp, of the area surrounding the meter box prior to work beginning.

  • A contractor hired by the City is digging down to expose the line directly in front of and directly behind the water meter. Once the line is exposed, they will perform a scratch test and a magnetism test to determine the type of material the pipe is made of.

  • The City is required to supply this information to the EPA no later than October 1, 2024.

  • The EPA is allowing cities to use a statistically valid sample of all water service connections which were installed prior to 1986. In Hermiston that equates to approximately 3,000 connections. From those accounts, 350 customers were selected utilizing a computer-based random number generator. This method provides EPA with an acceptable understanding of the prevalence of different types of service line materials in our community while containing costs.

  • The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has required all public drinking water systems in the United States to conduct these tests in order to develop an inventory of materials present in water service lines. Specifically, the test will show how many service lines may contain lead.

  • Upon completion of the inventory, a customer may, upon request and verification of customer identity, receive the results of the test for their home.

  • It usually takes about a week once the contractor starts to complete the testing and return the property to its original condition.

Pages