Published: November 04, 2009 08:39 am      

For sewers, can’t is not an option

No one wants to see local sewer bills go up by roughly 90 percent in a single year, but that’s exactly what officials at Logansport Municipal Utilities expect will happen in 2011.

They expect that the average customer’s $5 monthly bill will rise to $9 that year. And then it will keep going up for at least 15 years.

The reason is that Logansport faces a federal mandate to separate its storm and sanitary sewers.

This mandate has been coming down the pipeline at least since Congress passed the U.S. Clean Water Act of 2000.

Now officials are getting close to a final plan, and they’re hopng to spread the project out over as many years as possible. They’re also hoping that the least expensive projects they’ll be tackling first will make a bigger difference than they expect, perhaps allowing them to scale back on some of those more expensive projects they have scheduled toward the end of what they hope will be a 25-year timeline.

They also hope that they will be able to line up some grants to take some of the burden off local residents.

In the end, though, Logansport will have to tackle the bulk of the proposed $71 million project.

We can understand why local elected officials might want to say there’s just no way Logansport can take on such a project. After all, projections show that by the final year of this effort the average monthly sewer bill will be about $50, or 10 times what it is today.

Nevertheless, the city has no real choice.

Failure to comply with the mandate would bring stiff penalties, including a ban on sewer connections. That means that until the city got back into the federal government’s good graces, it would be barred from adding new homes or businesses to the sewer system, and that would effectively kill economic development.

Besides, what city really wants to be known for dumping raw sewage into its rivers? Clean rivers, after all, are what this federal mandate is all about.

On a dry day, the combined sewers work fine, but at a time of heavy rains, raw sewage finds its way into the Eel and Wabash rivers. Consultants say that happened more than 110 times last year.

The goal of these sewer improvements is to reduce that number, to make sure that raw sewage finds its way to the rivers only on rare occasions.

And that’s a goal we should all be able to support.