With more than 200 Duluth homeowners required to pay thousands of dollars to repair their sewer lines, Mayor Don Ness introduced a proposal Wednesday that would help them but increase the utility bills of nearly all city residents.
Ness is proposing a $3.21 monthly increase in the Clean Water surcharge, which is currently assessed at $5.51 to all homes connected to the city's sanitary sewer line.
The increase would go toward paying for 80 percent of a homeowner's cost to repair a lateral line, up to $5,000, with loans available to help pay for the rest, Ness said. Costs to repair the lines have varied from a few thousand dollars to as much as $20,000. The average repair has been in the $4,000 to $8,000 range.
Ness said the reimbursement would be available to any homeowner regardless of income and would be retroactive for those who already have been ordered to repair their sewer lines as part of the city's agreement with federal regulators.
He proposed a similar surcharge last year that would have charged residents almost $10 a month, but the council shot that down before settling on the $5-a-month fee, which goes solely toward building sanitary sewer overflow tanks.
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As some residents face thousands of dollars in sewer line improvements, Ness said he was hopeful this new proposal would pass.
"I believe councilors are seeing the impact," he said.
The city is requiring the homeowners to fix their lines to be in compliance with a federal Consent Decree that mandates the elimination of all sanitary overflows by 2016.
Asked if it's fair for all city homeowners to pay for the problems of a few, Ness said sewer overflows affect the entire city.
"We are faced as a community with the prospect of paying massive fines to the federal government if we don't come into compliance [with the consent decree]," he said. "We'll have severe development restrictions if we're not in compliance, and we want to achieve the goal of eliminating sanitary sewer overflows into Lake Superior and the St. Louis River. We all benefit from achieving that goal."
