It’s a dirty job, and the people who have to do it told the Lexington Forum’s March meeting about the task facing the city in replacing our outdated sewer system.
“We’re going to move forward as a community,” Charlie Martin, director of the Division of Water and Air Quality for LFUCG, told Forum members assembled at the Campbell House.
Members questioned Martin along with Cheryl Taylor, LFUCG’s environmental quality commissioner, about the city’s plans for capacity and how to fund the repairs.
While recent news stories have extensively covered the $250 million to $300 million project required by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the overall shape and design of the sewer infrastructure underground remains a mystery to most.
Martin was asked about the set up of the sanitary and storm sewers, and why, if they were two separate systems, the sanitary sewers would overflow during bouts of heavy rain.
Lexington, Martin said, has a lower price tag than others for this process because the city, in most cases, does have separate systems. Places like Northern Kentucky, Cincinnati and Louisville were designed to overflow into the Ohio River, which was a common practice when the systems were installed, but now create problems that are not only costly on the environment, but expensive to replace. “Back in those days, you had this big body of water, and it was ‘dilution is the solution to pollution.’ Lexington never had that … We recognized early on that we didn’t have that. We’ve been treating sewage at the Old Frankfort Pike site since 1918; Louisville didn’t have a treatment plant until 1950. So that tells you this community recognized very early on that they had some challenges, so they built separate systems. Unfortunately over time, for whatever reason, some folks then connected them together,” Martin said.
In certain areas around town, he has found interconnection of the sanitary and storm sewers which had been done to relieve areas where raw sewage was backing up into people’s homes. This practice has allowed sewage overflows to go directly into streams.
Martin said in response to a question about the proposed Webb high-rise development downtown that another major concern for the city’s antique and over-taxed infrastructure is how it can handle being added on to.
“In this community, especially in the last couple of years, there has been a lot of emphasis, and rightfully so, on infill and redevelopment. One of things that’s easy to recognize is that infill and redevelopment is, a lot of times, putting pressure on some of our older infrastructure,” he said. So putting a building with hundreds of hotel rooms and condos onto an old city block has unique problems that Martin said he is addressing with the developers.
Former Vice Mayor Isabel Yates asked Taylor how the city plans to implement its impermeable surfaces fee, as she stated a previous attempt for a storm water fee was thwarted after churches opposed the move.
“I would much rather engage our citizens and teach them ways to avoid these impermeable surfaces and do that early on,” Taylor said in response to Yates’ question. “There’s a lot of things people can do to minimize their footprint. There’s a lot of design options that you have. We have two years (before these fees are imposed), and as a community, we have to ... train people on how to do that.
“There’re a lot of different opportunities people can take in their homes to avoid having these kinds of surfaces,” she said.
For Martin and Taylor, talking to the community is as big of a priority as getting the system fixed, as evidenced by Martin’s answer to a question about whether excess capacity will be built into the system or if it will be scalable.
“That’s going to end up being the community’s decision,” Martin said. “... Once we reach an effective date that is set, decreed and signed by the judge… we’re going to move forward as a community. I anticipate having all the players at the table involved in that decision making.
“There is a public comment period as part of this. I don’t want to delay a solution; I plan on meeting the heck out of people all the way up to that point so that everybody will already know what’s the incremental of adding additional capacity at specific locations. As you know, that’s always a controversial decision that’s got to be out there on the table for the community to make this decision about if, how and where they want to grow,” Martin said.
You can listen to the Forum discussion online at www.lexingtonforum.org.