Many Pulaski County Sewer Board meetings have been filled with angry residents, but Tuesday’s special meeting to explain an upcoming $8 million bond proposal was held in an almost empty courthouse basement with more sewer board and Department of Natural Resources representatives present than audience members.
Sewer District Engineer Terris Cates told the nine people in his audience that the sewer district doesn’t have much choice.
“We have problems; if we don’t treat our wastewater, it goes straight into the drinking water,” Cates said. “We’re really trying to educate the public on what’s going on; we’re being required to do what we’re doing.”
The requirements are coming from the Missouri DNR, Cates said, and read from copies of a proposed permit that DNR officials expect to issue later this year that will require major upgrades in the sewer treatment facilities if the Pulaski County Sewer District is to comply.
“We’re already overloaded; we’re going to be struggling to stay in compliance even with the existing limits,” Cates said.
The existing system took over many existing sewer plants that were in poor condition a decade or more ago and have only gotten worse with time, Cates said. Even if the sewer plants were in better condition, Cates said the collector lines are in poor condition and showed photographs of 4-inch lines that he said were filled with roots and cracked.
“We put cameras down and had to pull them out because we were afraid that just having the cameras there was going to cause the lines to crack,” Cates said.
Cates said if voters approve a sewer bond proposal on Aug. 5 by the required 57 percent margin, the sewer district will be able to obtain lower-interest bonds of 2.5 percent or less rather than being forced to go to commercial banks to obtain higher rates of interest. That will save customers an estimated $142,000 per year over a period of 20 to 35 years, Cates said.
“If we pass the sewer bond, we’ll keep the rates down to $50 a month,” Cates said. “If we don’t pass it, you’re going to be paying $60 a month, and that’s just reality.”
That’s still less than areas in some larger cities where sewer rates are already running $80 to $100 per month due to major upgrades, he said.
Resident Jane Denbey wasn’t convinced.
“This is the same spiel you gave us in 1989 and told us we had to go on to (the sewer system),” Denbey said. “You keep telling us the rates will go down, but they don’t go down. They just keep going up and up.”
Cates said the area’s situation in the 1980s had gotten so bad that the Environmental Protection Agency, acting on DNR recommendations, had issued a special grant to allow the sewer district to organize and take over many failing septic systems and lagoons that today wouldn’t be allowed into the system.
Resident Carl Jensen wanted an explanation of how developers with substandard systems connect into the county sewer district.
“We add on these new subdivisions all the time,” Jensen said. “Why aren’t their sewer systems checked before they’re put on the system? We’re paying for things they should have paid for.”
Those problems don’t happen today, said Sewer District Operations Manager Randall Harris, who agreed there were past problems.
“We have some developers who think we are picking on them by trying to make them build things right,” Harris said. “We cannot continue to take this crap that these guys are throwing in the ground.”