Lakewood City Council to vote on the measures on Dec. 17.
As part of the discussion for next year’s city budget, Lakewood City Council is considering raising both the water and the sewer rates. City officials are looking to increase the sewer rates by 10 percent in 2013 in an effort to offset the cost of future sewer repairs mandated by the EPA. The topic came up during a round of budget negotiations on Saturday, reported LoveLakewood.com. Last week, an official from the EPA set up shop for a few days at Lakewood City Hall to examine the city’s storm water runoff. With Lakewood reporting in 2010 that 91.4 million gallons of storm/sewer water were dumped into Lake Erie, the EPA is forcing the city to make some changes. Those fixes to the city’s infrastructure could be expensive — as much as $500 …
Officials hope to comply with federal guidelines, but with a price tag of hundreds of millions of dollars, the city can’t swing it.
City officials concede that for the past 100 years in Lakewood, “the solution to pollution was dissolution.” That’s no longer an option. With Lakewood reporting in 2010 that 91.4 million gallons of storm/sewer water were dumped into Lake Erie, the EPA is forcing the city to make some changes. Those fixes to the city’s infrastructure could be expensive — as much as $500 million. The city is working on an agreement with the US EPA to address the problem. Lakewood’s combined sewers are designed to take all flows to the treatment plant, which can process about 20 million gallons per day. However, during storms, the volume of water entering the combined sewer system can exceed both the capacity of the combined sewers and the treatment plant. …
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Harriet Petti
11:34 pm on Wednesday, December 5, 2012
These systems are old systems and the amount of overflow that was acceptable for runoff led us down the path to bacteria levels in our lake that left it unsafe for use. We have to put the money into the infrastructure, even with water use down, we still have waste water and sewage to treat. We are so lucky to have easy and reliable access to water, if it means 3% hike in our sewage bill, I'm ok … more ›