BY ROGER SMITH
MOUNTAIN CITIZEN
INEZ — For years, Martin County’s water crisis was measured in indignities. Brown water in bathtubs. Buckets carried up hillsides. Faucets that could not be trusted. A community forced to document its own hardship again and again, hoping that somewhere beyond the mountains, someone in power would finally pay attention.
On Monday, with the stroke of a pen in Frankfort, that long campaign produced what Martin County Judge/Executive Lon Lafferty called the largest and most meaningful response the county has ever received: nearly $26 million for water and sewer improvements.
“It is the greatest thing that has happened for us,” Lafferty said.
The money — $25,818,550 released through House Joint Resolution 81 and the state’s Water and Wastewater Assistance for Troubled or Economically Restrained Systems (WWATERS) program — will fund eight projects involving the Martin County Water District and Martin County Sanitation District.
Martin County’s part is nearly half of the $52 million released statewide to improve water systems across rural Kentucky.
For Lafferty, the number itself tells the story.
“It is $26 million,” he said. “In the past, we have been able to get $2 million or $3 million, and a lot of times that was our own money that Frankfort was approving — the use of our coal severance money. Or we would get nice federal earmarks — $5 million or $6 million — in a piecemeal fashion. Now, we have $26 million.”
In Martin County, where water failures have shaped daily life and public trust for years, the award lands as both a practical investment and a symbolic one — an acknowledgment, at last, that the county’s crisis was not exaggerated, not temporary and not someone else’s problem.
Lafferty praised Gov. Andy Beshear and state lawmakers for delivering the money, calling it proof that cooperation at the state level can still matter in a place that has often felt forgotten.
“We are grateful to the governor and our legislature,” Lafferty said. “This money will help our people and shows what is possible when elected leaders work together.”
But if the moment was celebratory, Lafferty was careful not to describe it as simple.
The judge said the size of the award demands something Martin County residents have asked for just as often as they asked for help: accountability.
He said it is imperative that the water and sanitation districts have a plan in place and follow that plan “to the letter of the law.”
“It has to be done systematically, and it has to be reported systematically,” Lafferty said. “We have to keep an eye on it and monitor it.”
That message, he said, is already being echoed back to him by the people he talks to across the county.
“A lot of the people I talk to are excited about it, but you also hear, ‘Make sure you oversee it and that it gets spent how it is supposed to, Doc,’” he said. “That is what we are going to try to do.”
He even floated a distinctly local answer to that concern: monthly progress reports published in The Mountain Citizen so residents can see how the money is being spent and how the projects are progressing.
Lafferty said the award is a payoff from a quarter-century of public insistence by residents, advocates, utility board members, elected officials, Water Warriors, Concerned Citizens and a local press corps that kept the issue in front of the public even when the story was painful and repetitive.
Importantly, he said, it was the people of Martin County who forced the state to look.
“It finally reached a critical mass where even the legislators said, ‘We have to step up. We have no choice. We have to do it,’” Lafferty said.
“That is the effect of people working to point out how bad it is, showing those photos and videos of brown water, the little girl running up the mountain to collect water and putting a spotlight on things. This is what that has come to.”
He spoke with particular appreciation for the community members who attended meetings, made calls, made comments and refused to let Martin County’s water crisis fade into the background noise of rural decline.
“As county judge, I get to announce these things, but this is the culmination of decades of work by the people,” Lafferty said. “It has been a community effort.”
He added, “And I am going to oversee it as best I can to make sure the work gets done.”
Martin County residents know better than most that an appropriation is not the same as a completed project and that money alone does not repair decades of neglect. They also know what it means to be heard after years of shouting.
By the end of his remarks, Lafferty placed the moment in an even longer history — one that reaches beyond water lines and sewer plants and into the labor that powered Kentucky and the nation itself.
“We always need to thank the people who brought the wealth out of these mountains,” he said. “The wealth did not stay here; rich land did not create rich people. Those coal miners, generation after generation, went in there, and many of them ended up with chests full of coal dust and broken-down backs. Those are the people who worked so that water, buildings and bridges could be supplied throughout this state. I am grateful we are getting this money, and grateful to those coal miners. It really goes back to their efforts. Without them, we would not be where we are today.”
Under HJR 81, Martin County Water District’s line items include:
- $964,850 — Kentucky Route 292 booster station and water line
- $6,471,900 — Davella pump station and line replacement
- $3,294,561 — debt service
- $769,210 — tank repair and painting
Martin County Sanitation District’s projects include:
- $1,687,380 — Blacklog gravity line replacement
- $6,596,750 — countywide lift station replacement
- $2,169,799 — debt service
- $3,864,100 — Inez wastewater system improvements
Created by the General Assembly in 2024, Kentucky’s Water and Wastewater Assistance for Troubled or Economically Restrained Systems program is designed to help struggling utilities address major infrastructure and financial needs. Lawmakers set aside $75 million in each year of the current two-year budget — $150 million total — for the program.
It is administered through the Kentucky Infrastructure Authority.
House Joint Resolution 81 did not create new funding. Instead, it released money already appropriated by the legislature for ranked projects statewide.
Other recipients include the cities of Elkhorn, Evarts, Liberty, Martin, Oak Grove and Smithland, as well as the Southern Water and Sewer District in McDowell.