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Wednesday, 11 July 2007 |
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Page 1 of 2 By Buck Traxler, I-O Editor
This past week after a lot of mish-mash discussion the city council voted on a split vote with the tie broken by a vote of the mayor to proceed with a mechanical fix of the city’s sewer-lagoon system.
Readers may recall that recently Denny Rehberg, our lone Congressman, secured a $500,000 grant earmarked to help with the project. And while that will help with costs, a little, nevertheless, the bottom line is your sewer costs will climb about $20, maybe even higher.
The mayor says the last thing he wants to do is put a higher rate on the people. However, in order to keep from being fined by the state and/or federal government for a system that is not in compliance with mandated federal regulations our taxes or fees or what ever you want to call it will skyrocket.
What kinda-sorta gets me is no one can tell you what the fines for not being in compliance will be. I mean no one has even a “guesstament” of what a fine could be.
But, down to a gnat’s patoot, we can nail the well over a million dollars it will cost to fix the problem and exactly how much to pull out of your pockets to get the job done. We can find, in a just three days, a calf in Canada with mad cow disease, figure down to a dime the cost of sending a shuttle into space to work on a space station, but even the engineers of Morrison Maierle can’t, or won’t, predict what the fines may be for the mandated –You don’t have a choice kid – rules handed down by the Feds and DEQ.
What’s wrong with this picture? Fix it or else. Or else what, you going to take our birthdays away? Are you arbitrarily going to pull a number out of a hat or a jar to fine us (the city)?
No matter, we got $500K from Denny. But what about the other members of our Congressional delegation, can’t they help? Recently visited in Great Falls, Senators Baucus and Tester were non-committal in saying they remember Conrad as a positive forward moving community.
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