Monday, August 27, 2007

Meeting Tuesday on Sewer Repairs

There will be a meeting on Tuesday, 8/28/07, 7 PM at the Whitestown Community Center to address the County's sewer repairs under the Consent Order. Per the Sentinel:
"Picente said the meeting will update all of the communities involved with the process of complying with the consent order and allow community representatives who serve on the Sewer Advisory Board to meet the professional staff that will be providing engineering services to the project. . . .

". . . The cost of the correction will be borne by those who use the part-county sewer district."
As noted in yesterday's post's analysis, the situation was caused by (1) the County allowing hook ups that caused separated waste to pass through its over flow untreated and (2) the individual municipalities' failure to recognize that this would happen due to their own inadequate environmental reviews of new development projects.

It will be interesting to see
if "all of the communities involved" will include the one whose residents will be paying the bulk of the costs through sewer usage fees -- Utica.

It will be interesting to see if the process for selecting the engineering firms (who will probably bill $3-5 million for the study alone) will be explained and justified.

It will be interesting to see if financial relief will be discussed for the residents of the municipalities that were innocent of wrongdoing or negligence.

It will be interesting to see if the County will reveal its plan to shaft the residents of Utica by denying them the treatment plant capacity that Utica residents paid for to accommodate Utica's Combined Sewer Overflows.

The County should be responsible for the Consent Order's fines, because the County violated the law. The Towns and Villages that authorized the developments which are sending separated sanitary waste into the river should pay the tab to fix the projects that the Towns and Villages authorized.

I
ndividual sewer users are innocent, and should be held harmless. The Consent Order's costs should not show up on our water bills.

Interesting indeed . . .

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