Fort Wayne Combined Sewer Overflow

Well this week it was announced that the Federal Government and the city of Fort Wayne reached an agreement concerning the amount of raw sewage the city of Fort Wayne is dumping into the rivers. This is a topic I have blogged extensively about in the last couple of years.

Our sewers and stormwater systems were designed well over one hundred years ago. We are one of many cities that elected to have these two system overflow to each other. The Federal government has disallowed this and is in the process of requiring many cities to stop discharging large amounts of raw sewage into the rivers.

Basically Fort Wayne proposed to cut its raw sewage discharge by about 90% for a cost of about one quarter of a billion dollars over the next 18 years. The Federal government has accepted that. Realize that to lower the discharge the final 10% would have cost an additional quarter of a billion dollars!

It is currently estimated that sewer rates will triple over the next 18 years to pay for the infrastructure improvements that will be necessary to lower the sewage discharge into the rivers.

Just for the record, I told you this would happen. Several people scoffed at me and said that it wold not be this expensive...

One of the reasons I oppose frivolous projects like Harrison Square is the fact that I knew that lowering the discharge of sewage into the rivers would be very expensive.

The local news media did cover this story, for one day.

The fact that our sewer rates will be tripling got about the same amount of attention as did the fact the Matt Kelty's relatives paid for a Cruise for his family.

Mike Sylvester