Agency warns of flooding, sink-holes from cave-ins, if it can’t do much more to shore up its aging infrastructure.

The Metropolitan Sewer District needs to spend as much as $4.3 billion over the next two decades to upgrade its sewage and Ohio River flood protection systems and protect the community from likely heavier storms, a team of consulting engineers has concluded.

That includes spending about $617 million between now and 2024 to complete and maintain new facilities, required by a 2005 federal consent decree to dramatically reduce overflows of bacteria-laden sewage into area waterways.

The agency’s new long-term facilities plan written by the consulting engineers describes a community that’s waited too long to make substantial reinvestments in facilities that protect hundreds of thousands of people from flooding, sewer-line cave-ins and failing sewage treatment. The plan identifies 506 projects and is scheduled to be posted on MSD’s website Tuesday and made available in Louisville libraries the same day.

MSD is also kicking off a public comment period in advance of rate-setting that will occur this summer.

“We have this bucket that is old, and we have been trying to keep it together with Band-Aids because our consent decree” has dominated agency spending, MSD Executive Director Tony Parrott said. “We are having these flooding issues, we are having these wastewater backup issues, and we are having crumbling infrastructure under everybody’s feet that nobody can see.”

MSD has made no recommendation yet on rate changes but the engineers lay out one way to fund all of the proposed work on schedule over two decades that would involve a 23-percent rate increase in the first year, followed by more routine and decreasing rates through 2036.

The five-volume plan and the district’s communication strategy follows a rebuke that MSD leadership received from the Louisville Metro Council and Mayor Greg Fischer last year after MSD failed to persuade the council to support a one-time, 20-percent bump in rates to free up borrowing capacity to begin work on the projects. Those political leaders told MSD to do a better job explaining the risks and needs, and do a better job of detailing how they planned to spend the money before coming back for such a large increase in 2017.

Fischer’s spokesman, Chris Poynter, said the mayor – who hires MSD’s executive director and appoints its board – has not yet taken a position on future MSD rate increases.

“This report and the public process that follows is important to help educate citizens about the real and long-term needs in Louisville to combat flooding and protect the city,” Poynter said in a written statement. “It’s important first to understand the scope of the issues.”

Metro Council doubts

Metro Council President David Yates said council members “need to make sure we are not overburdened by taxes. We are reluctant to have any kind of increase.”

But he complimented MSD for compiling the new facilities plan and said council members and their legal team will be scrutinizing it, and said he would remind MSD to do more to reach out to the public.

“I am hoping it’s not doom and gloom,” he said of the plan. “It’s heartbreaking there are so many needs in the city we cannot afford.”

But Yates added that he feels confident that if something is really needed for public safety, elected officials and the public “will want to pitch in.”

Parrott said MSD took last year’s criticism from council members and the mayor to heart and wants to begin a new conversation with the community. He said officials want to explain what they believe are serious life-and-death vulnerabilities and the upgrades needed to support current businesses and continued economic and population growth.

Greater Louisville Inc. spokeswoman Alison Brotzge-Elder said MSD and GLI representatives have met several times on the 20-year infrastructure plan. “It’s too early to give …. much feedback on this, but it is of great importance to GLI and the community for a variety of reasons,” she said. GLI is the metro area chamber of commerce.

Risks and solutions identified in the plan affect every neighborhood in Louisville and Jefferson County during a time of increasing heavy storms that have flooded hundreds of homes. An MSD presentation features headlines ripped from the Courier-Journal and other local news outlets of cars swamped in flooded roads and viaducts; photos of boat rescues; and giant sinkholes from century-old brick sewer collapses.

MSD has 16 Ohio River flood pumping stations – more than half beyond their designed lifespan. The CJ last year reported on one of them at Paddy’s Run in west Louisville that is equipped with 1950s technology to do a 21st-century job of protecting 70,000 homes and 6,000 businesses in more than 40 neighborhoods extending from Park Duvalle to Middletown. It was designed to last 50 years and is now approaching 65.

Consultants offer warning

“We believe that the recommendations presented in this … plan are essential to maintaining reliable facilities that will allow MSD to fulfill its responsibility for safe, clean waterways, and to help preserve and promote our competitiveness as a city,” six engineers from the consulting firms of CH2M Hill, Strand Associates Inc., HDR Engineering Inc., Jacoby Toomz & Lantz Inc., wrote in their cover letter.

MSD officials will need to secure Metro Council approval for any rate increase greater than 6.9 percent. Last year’s 20 percent proposal would have added about $107 for the year to a typical residential customer, or about $9 a month. MSD customers are billed every other month by the Louisville Water Co.

Council members last year said many of their constituents called them to protest higher rates, which MSD said would still keep them at or slightly above national averages.

Parrott said the MSD board is looking into ways to expand its program to help low-income senior citizens pay their bills to other low-income families.

The consultants wrote that taking on these projects now will require a bigger than normal increase in wastewater and drainage rates, which have generally fallen between 5 percent and 7 percent annually for years.

They identified one way to pay for all the work on a 20-year schedule: raise customers’ rates 23 percent during the next fiscal year, followed by increases of 6.9 percent through 2024, dropping to 5 percent through 2030, then tailing off to 3.5 percent in 2036.

“If the community is unwilling to accept the rate increases necessary to fund the project schedules recommended, then many important projects will need to be deferred until the major consent decree spending is complete” in 2024.

But that nine-year delay “is almost certain to result in more infrastructure failures, an increase in the overall cost of implementing the facility plan, and an ever more rapidly increasing likelihood of a failure that could have serious consequences for the residents and business that make Louisville Metro their home,” they warned.

Reach reporter James Bruggers at (502) 582-4645 and at [email protected].

Highlights

  • $683 million for the Ohio River flood protection system. Prevents catastrophic impacts from Ohio River flooding.
  • $1.2 billion for stormwater drainage and inland flooding. Louisville has a hard time handling storms greater than 2 or 3 inches within 24 hours, and some 12,000 homes are in flood-prone areas. MSD wants to build more stormwater collection basins and increase funding for buying and removing frequently flooded homes.
  • $435 million for roadway viaduct upgrades. Flooding occurs at 34 viaducts in some areas with as little as 2 inches of rain. Flooded viaducts like one on Third Street near U of L impair police and firefighters and cause transportation headaches.
  • $496 million for crumbling sewers. There are 186 miles of sewers between 110 and 150 years old; 307 miles between 75 and 100 years old; 664 miles between 51 and 75 years old. Older ones are made of brick or brick and stone and when they collapse, they cause dangerous sinkholes in streets.
  • $849 million for wastewater treatment facilities. Morris Forman treatment plant serves 56 percent of the community but had a catastrophic failure in 2015 after lightning strike, sending millions of gallons of untreated sewage into the Ohio River. Its solids-handling facilities are wearing out and need to be replaced.
  • $617 million to complete $943 million EPA-required plan to greatly reduce sewage overflows into area waterways.

Join the discussion

  • Starting Tuesday, visit any branch of the Louisville Free Public Library to get access to the five-volume, 20-year facilities plan.
  • Go online to www.LouisvilleMSD.org/CriticalRepairPlan to see the same plan.
  • Use a comment form provided by MSD at that MSD web page.
  • Email comments to [email protected].
  • Request MSD to send speakers to your community organization.
  • Follow MSD website for notices of community meetings.