| Back to the drawing board for Ham Lake task force |
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| Wednesday, 14 October 2009 | ||
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Staff writer A neighorhood task force is looking for cheaper alternatives after residents rejected an expensive community sewer plan.
A range of $4.8 million and $6.8 million was the estimate to construct a community sewer system that could service 143 existing individual sewage treatment systems with the possibility of 36 additional hook-ups. Road reconstruction would be an additional cost that may or may not have been assessed. The neighborhood would have also had to cover annual maintenance costs. The cost per month for the first 20 years was estimated to be somewhere between $167 and $247 if everybody hooked up right away. Because some with newer systems might not initially hook up, there was another estimate of what the monthly fee would for the first 20 years if only 82 percent hooked up. The range was $260 to $358 per month. “Even as task force members, we felt this was over the top for expenses,” said task force member Lynn Christensen said. However, the task force decided that it wanted to give the neighborhood an update of the research it have done so far and it got a very firm response that there would be no support for a project as expensive as was being discussed. Mayor Paul Meunier said when it was suggested that there be a public meeting to talk about the numbers, he was worried that it might kill any project before more reasonable alternatives were explored. Mark Hylle said he was supportive of the city looking into a community sewer project, but once he saw the high numbers at the Aug. 20 public meeting, he lost interest. “Who wants to pay that much money in this economy?” Hylle asked. The catch was that assessors would have to show property valuations increasing by the amount of the assessment in order for the city to charge it, which many residents felt would have been difficult to prove. Hylle commented that he is glad that the task force and city are at least trying to do something. Some other residents do not feel this is a neighborhood-wide problem. Todd Downs said there is no reason to bring city sewer and water into a lakefront community. Gayle Johnson said only a few septic systems are failing, according to information given by Thomas Hailey, a senior engineer with the city’s contracted engineering firm of RFC Engineering. She does not feel her neighborhood needs to spend the money now on a community sewer system. “I have a nice yard and a septic system that is working dandy,” Johnson said. “I’m not violating anything.” At the Aug. 20 public meeting, Hailey said three systems are failing and there are over 100 systems that are questionable, but not necessarily in imminent danger of failing. Hailey said if a septic system is older than 30 years, there could be a mottling issue and unless the owner has this tested, they might not be aware of this. Johnson said if housing development was booming around them and helped pay for area sewer, that might be a different case, but that is not the case. The neighborhood has also seen no evidence that Coon Lake is being contaminated by failing septic systems. She thinks that if this was happening, the neighborhood would look at this whole discussion differently. Meunier would like the city to continue to seek federal dollars to lessen the financial burden on the neighborhood for a community sewer system. “If we do the (high-performance) individual septic systems, that might be an answer that will work for now, but not in the long-term,” Meunier said. Meunier believes that sooner or later, a community sewer system will be needed, he said. Councilmember Gary Kirkeide said the task force will ask the University of Minnesota Extension and the Anoka County Health Department to give it information on different type of systems such as high-performance septic systems that a resident talked about at the Aug. 20 meeting. Since he found out in 1999 that the city was looking at a road reconstruction project in the Coon Lake area, Mike Bury has wanted the city to plan for the long-term so that newer roads would not have to be ripped out for a future sewer project. Bury, who is one of the dozen task force members, understands that assessments that could reach the level of $40,000 over 40 years is a lot to handle, but said this would still be the best long-term investment. Bury said other septic systems will still have problems meeting existing Minnesota Pollution Control Agency setback and depth requirements on the small pieces of property in the Coon Lake area, which is one of the main reasons the city began looking at a community sewer project. “The way I see it, it’s impossible to do anything but a community sewer,” Bury said. Christensen believes the task force is not really back at “square-one,” but she said they are painted into a corner, so the problems out there may have to be solved individually until East Bethel’s sewer system comes in around the north side of Coon Lake, which may not happen for another decade or more. East Bethel’s sewer plan is to begin Phase 1A in the neighborhoods on the north side of Coon Lake area by 2015, but this is dependent on the economy recovering enough to create a demand for sewer infrastructure development along Highway 65 in Phase 1, which has yet to happen. Eric Hagen is at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it |
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