Water woes caused by city pipe cost salon tens of thousands, owner says

Looking out the front window of her Elm Street salon on a scorching mid-July morning, Debbie Sims’ gaze falls on a familiar sight: utility trucks lining the blacktop.

“Just that right there is anxiety city,” Sims says.

Sims’ family has been in the hair business for four generations. Her grandparents owned Jack’s School of Beauty in Wichita Falls for 20 years. When Denton High School opened its cosmetology department, Sims’ mom, who also served on the State Board of Cosmetology, was one of the first instructors. Sims’ daughter, Karissa, is now a hairdresser in Sims’ salon, Debi Do & Co.

A longtime resident, Sims is also a frequent participant in Denton community events, serving on the board of the Denton Festival Foundation, which presents the Denton Arts & Jazz Festival, with her stylists, providing free haircuts to the unhoused.

But after 30 years, Sims’ business and legacy are facing their greatest threat yet, and it’s not inflation or the coronavirus pandemic at fault — it’s an old city water pipe.

City staff don’t know the exact age of the underground pipe that supplies water to Sims’ salon, but it is old enough to be vulnerable to frequent interruptions. Debi Do experienced 13 outages last year, costing Sims’ business roughly $67,000 in revenue. Sims said the water interruptions have become more frequent over the past five years, causing her salon, which opened in 2014, to lose water dozens of times and close in the middle of serving clients.

An incident this past month turned out to be routine service that didn’t cause Debi Do to close, but Sims says the salon usually isn’t so lucky.

“I’ve had to give a lot of services away and not charge them,” Sims said. “I’ve had to give my stylists here booth rent because I want to pay them back, I don’t want to lose them. So it’s cost me more than $60,000, but you know, I just feel like the city should reimburse something. I’ve never even had an ‘I’m sorry.’”

It’s her stylists she worries about most. The closures have taken a toll on her hairdressers, who don’t receive paid time off, and their clients.

“It’s a big chunk of your income when you have to cancel all your clients,” said Lisa Garrett, who has worked at Debi Do since its opening.

More than the inconvenience or the lost revenue, Sims fears the outages could land her and her stylists in legal hot water. With caustic chemicals such as bleach in regular use, water shutoff at the wrong time could mean chemical burns and hair loss for clients.

During an incident the week of Easter, Sims and her eight stylists had a full salon when city contractor Lloyd’s Asphalt ruptured the water main around 11 a.m.

City staff brought her eight cases of bottled water, but Sims said they were little help in rinsing half-dried solvents from clients’ hair — that requires pressure. With the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation requiring businesses to have running water while in operation, Sims was again forced to close the salon for the rest of the day.

After receiving a frantic call from Sims, City Manager Sara Hensley visited the salon during the outage.

“I told her [Hensley], ‘I want you to go in there and tell those people the plan because I don’t have a plan. I don’t know what to tell them. I’ve lied to them over and over that y’all are going to fix it, and y’all still don’t fix it,’” Sims said.

Hensley directed Lloyd’s to reimburse Sims for the day’s closure, but as for the other lost revenue, Sims was told she had little recourse. She had reached out to the city’s Risk Management department in October but said she was never offered a resolution. In December, she sent a letter to Mayor Gerard Hudspeth and the rest of the City Council, pleading for help.

“I’d just had it — enough was enough,” Sims said.

In a February Zoom meeting with Hudspeth, Hensley and other city officials, Sims was told the city would take immunity on the lost revenue experienced by the salon. Taken on a case-by-case basis in Denton, according to Assistant City Manager David Gains, the remedy exempts local and state governments from financial liability for most damage created while conducting government business.

Sims tried filing a commercial insurance claim, but her carrier told her in a letter it felt the city of Denton was liable for the losses.

City staff has anticipated needing to replace the infrastructure on Elm and Locust streets between University Drive and Eagle Drive for at least a decade. The southern portion of the project, which replaced the water, sewer and drainage infrastructure from Eagle to south of the Courthouse on the Square, will be complete when the roadway is reconstructed. But the estimated $21 million upgrade to the northern portion of the project, which includes the area in front of Sims’ salon, has yet to be funded.

Rebecca Diviney, who directs capital projects in the city’s engineering office, said her department has been working with the Texas Department of Transportation, which owns the roadway, and Denton County to coordinate replacement plans. If approved, a proposed agreement would see the city take over Elm and Locust from TxDOT, replacing the infrastructure and reconstructing the roadway with money from a county bond election set to take place in November.

“Our hopes are that through this collaboration, we can work with TxDOT and the county to do the same improvements on the northern side of town for water, sewer and drainage and roadway improvements, and also finish the construction on the south side of town to have the roadway completely reconstructed,” Diviney said.

If you ask Sims, a funding shortfall isn’t an acceptable excuse for not fixing the infrastructure that supports the businesses on North Elm.

“If that was me continually not trying to fix something, they would come and fine me; they would shut me down; they would do everything to me to get me to fix it,” Sims said.

Valves were installed on either side of the salon’s property in March in the hopes of minimizing further disruptions until the pipe could be replaced.

“If we had an outage upstream of their property, we could feed them from the downstream side; if we had an outage on the downstream side, we could feed them … from the upstream side,” said Stephen Gay, director of water and wastewater for Denton.

Sims said that was little help in April when Lloyd’s hit and fractured the pipe between the two valves, but city staff said the workaround has otherwise functioned as intended.

If an agreement can be reached and the infrastructure upgrade is funded, it could take a year to finish the right-of-way and project design, and another few years to complete the work. Earlier this month, the city also provided Debi Do with four 5-gallon portable electric pressure rinse kits, allowing the salon to at least rinse chemicals from clients’ hair during outages.

“This is a priority to us — we understand the disruption caused not only to her salon, but everyone in this area,” Gains said. “Over the past few months, we have really worked very closely with TxDOT and with the county to try to get this to be the priority that it needs to be on this project moving forward. So we do feel like there’s momentum now; we’re going to get to a resolution.

“It’s certainly not acceptable for this to continue to be stalled in the nature it has been.”

The remedies help relieve some of the day-to-day anxiety for Debi Do’s staff. But as for the future, Sims believes a permanent fix is the only way to keep her business alive.

“Do I have confidence in the city and the water here? No, I do not,” Sims said. “I want them to do the right thing. That’s the only thing I want.”