Winchester Municipal Utilities General Manager Mike Flynn said he wasn’t planning to retire this soon.

The 25-year employee realized the time created an opportunity he couldn’t pass up, though, and Flynn will retire at the end of March.

At press time, no plans for Flynn’s replacement had been announced.

Flynn compared his retirement to career politicians, who he said can stay too long.

“I like to step aside and see other people move up,” Flynn said. “I felt it was time to move aside. The timing was right.”

Flynn became general manager nearly 10 years ago, following a period of turmoil at the utility company.

At one point, he said he didn’t think he would make it through the first year as general manager, between the demands from the position and others.

Things eventually settled and with good people around him, he said, things got better.

Flynn, a life-long Winchester resident, said he started at the utility upon a recommendation of a friend from college already working at WMU. The job was good, the friend said.

“I was working part-time for UPS,” he said. “When I got hired, I possessed some engineering skills.”

Flynn said he was promised he would get moved around within WMU to a position where he could use those skills.

“It took three years to move me around,” he said. “It gave me an opportunity to learn the utility from the inside.

“I started in the operations department, started in the ditch. I learned how to use a shovel, how to use a pick and do hard labor.”

For those first three years, Flynn was part of a work crew.

“You spend eight to 10 hours of your day here,” he said. “When you’re part of a crew, you spend more than that fighting line breaks and sewer lines. When you’re needed… you’ve got to respond.”

Those calls come in the middle of the night, in the sweltering summer and the most frigid winter.

Winter calls were the hardest, he said.

‘When its cold, you’re dealing with problems,” he said. “The frigid temperatures add an element (of difficulty) to everything. It’s harder for the machinery to work.”

Because so much of the work relies on touch, gloves were often a hindrance, he said.

Flagging traffic, though, was the job no one wanted in winter.

“It was always warmer in the ditch because the water wasn’t frozen,” Flynn said. “We would often quarrel about who would get in the ditch. Nobody wanted to flag traffic.”

That time also brought Flynn’s nightmare call, which wound up lasting three days. Flynn and his supervisor were on a farm to repair air relief valves on a raw water line between the pump station and the water plant. The supervisor told Flynn to knock the valves off, which sent a geyser of water shooting into the air until the pressure was gone.

After returning from getting a drink minutes later, the water was still spouting, he said. What they didn’t know was a finished water line crossed the raw water line and they knocked the valves off the wrong line. Then the shutoff valve at the plant broke and problems compounded.

“We wound up working over three days,” he said. “I didn’t go home for three days. We slept in the basement here, taking power naps.

“It kept compounding. We had to call a contractor in to excavate… and my foot was the cause of it. You learn from that.”

Through the following years, Flynn worked his way through the other areas of WMU including the plants and engineering.

“There’s not a job in this utility I’ve not done,” he said.

The big projects, like building new water treatment and wastewater treatment plants, make the headlines but Flynn said he gets more satisfaction from neighborhood projects and resolving longstanding problems for residents.

Through the years, Flynn said WMU had installed hundreds and hundreds of feet of new water or sewer lines throughout their service area.

“You go in, they get new water and new sewer,” he said. “Their yard gets repaired. The plants are definitely needed, but there’s more positive feedback (from the neighborhood projects).

“We’ve been able to do a lot of good for the community.”

Flynn said the utility is also close to resolving the long-standing consent decree from the federal EPA to repair sanitary sewer over flows throughout the community.

“During my entire time at WMU, the consent decree has been part of the landscape,” he said. “We have eliminated 24 of the 27 SSO’s and have a plan to take care of the last three.”