The East Baton Rouge Parish Sanitary Sewer Overflow program isn’t expected to complete all the requirements of its federal consent decree until 2022—which will be four years after the city-parish completed upgrades to its sewer system, and at a price $400 million higher than billed to the public just seven years ago.
City-parish officials estimate it will ultimately cost more than $1.6 billion to fulfill all consent decree requirements, which include maintaining permit requirements at the two wastewater treatment plants and continuing to reduce sanitary sewer overflows in the collection. It’s a far cry from the $654 million cost anticipated in 2006, and considerably higher than the $1.25 billion projected as recently as 2013.
Why has the price tag swelled so much, especially since the 115 projects tied to the program were all finished by December 2018?
The short answer: More projects were added to the program in 2013, under a renegotiation of the consent decree led by former Mayor Kip Holden’s administration. Those projects, then estimated at $140 million—which include emergency generators for more than 400 pumping stations and the installation of a real-time control system to allow the city-parish to manage wet weather flows—have since been completed.
“Consent decrees don’t talk about construction dollars, only about programs and projects. That’s the main reason the dollars have gone up,” says Richard Speer, who oversees the Department of Environmental Services. “The feds don’t care about how much you spend, you just have to do the projects. They’re famous for bankrupting municipalities. They didn’t bankrupt us, but we’ve spent a lot.”
Why, then, won’t the city-parish meet its federal consent decree obligations until 2022?
Speer says that while the 2013 deadline extension (which took place before he assumed his position) required all projects to be finished by late 2018, the feds also require the remaining consent decree items be fulfilled—a process that typically lasts four years from the date of completion, though he says it could wrap in three.
The scope of the overall project has also greatly expanded since the federal government first ordered East Baton Rouge Parish to fix its outdated system in 1988, with the parish entering into a consent decree with the EPA and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality in 2002.
But those plans changed in 2007, when the agencies approved a city-parish request to revise the plan into a $1.25 billion overhaul of the sewer system that involved not only fixing the old, leaky pipes, but closing the since-decommissioned Central Wastewater Treatment Plant and laying miles of new pipe to divert flow to another plant (itself a $20 million add-on, though the property sits idle with no plans on the horizon).
Since then, the cost has swelled to $1.66 billion, according to the city-parish’s 2020 annual operating budget (pg. 293), the bulk of which is going toward construction, while another $150 million is going to program administration.
Meanwhile, rates will go up by about 4% for the next few years, with a typical family of four or five spending $55 per month to use 8,600 gallons.
The city-parish chalks up rising rates to increased bond payments. Back in 2003, the Metro Council approved a sewer fee increase of 10%, allowing for a 4% annual increase every year thereafter. Since debt service on the sewer bond will peak in 2025, the city-parish has projected 4% rate hikes every year until then.
“The sewer rate increases are directly tied to the repayment of the bonds issued to pay for the construction projects,” says Mark Armstrong, spokesman for Mayor Sharon Weston Broome’s office, in an email. “As originally negotiated, the payment of the bond debt is increasing every year.”
