Published: October 21, 2009 08:46 am      

Sewer project isn’t really optional

Faced with the prospect of building $71 million worth of sewers, it’s tempting for a community such as Logansport to just say no. We’d like to say we can’t afford it, that there’s just no way we can come up with that kind of money.

But the fact is we don’t have much choice. Logansport is one of 100 cities in Indiana and 770 nationwide faced with a mandate to cut down on the amount of raw sewage reaching the rivers from its combined storm and sanitary sewers.

Perhaps ironically, the work Logansport has been ordered to do over the next 15 to 25 years will amount to undoing work carried out by the federal government in the 1950s to keep Logansport from flooding. At the time, the combined sewers were state of the art. Now, they’re considered an environmental hazard.

Individual stormwater bills stand to go up from the current $5 a month to more like $9 a month in 2011. The bill would continue to climb gradually until it reached $56 a month in 2023.

Just for the record, the work is clearly needed. Consultants found the sewers overflowing on 114 days last year. That means untreated human waste was flowing into the river, increasing bacteria levels in the water.

The project would install about 22 miles of sewage lines to separate water into larger tanks, reducing the overflow points to two or three rather than 15. The new lines would also cut the number of overflow days from 114 to 10.

The project is part of an agreement reached two years ago between the city’s wastewater utility and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management.

If the city fails to make the needed changes, it will face a sewer ban, meaning that no new homes or businesses could tie into the sewer system.

That would essentially put the brakes on economic development.

Frankly, utility officials are proposing to spread this work over the longest possible period. The project will take at least 15 years, and if they can, the utilities will stretch that to 25.

They’re also hoping to win some help from the federal government. If they succeed, the impact on local utility bills will be lower.

We applaud officials at Logansport Municipal Utilities for their efforts to limit the impact on local homeowners and businesses. And we wish them success.