Lexington says $590 million EPA mandated sewer projects won’t be done by deadline
Lexington will need to ask federal and state environmental regulators for additional time to finish at least 51 sewer and stormwater projects the city is required to do under a 2008 legal settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency and Kentucky regulators, city officials said Tuesday.
As part of the 2008 consent decree with the EPA and the state of Kentucky, city officials agreed to address a host of stormwater and sewer issues that would increase capacity in the city’s stormwater and sewer systems and decrease overflows.
That included $590 million in 115 capital projects including sewer pipe replacements, new pump stations and 10 wet weather storage tanks.
The deadline to complete those projects is Dec. 31, 2026. There are 51 tasks left to be completed.
Roadblocks
The city was on schedule prior to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020, said Charlie Martin, director of water quality for the city, during a Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council Environmental Quality and Public Works Committee meeting.
Supply chain issues caused by the coronavirus pandemic and problems getting businesses and landowners to release easements so crews can work has significantly slowed progress, Martin said.
To date, 64 projects have been completed. Twenty eight are in the design phase. An additional 23 are pending and have not been designed yet. Completing 51 projects in four years is untenable, he said. The city has previously said it needed to complete eight projects a year to make the 2026 deadline.
“The inability to do these projects has to do with external factors that we can’t control,” Martin said.
A recent sewer pipe replacement project in the Gardenside area was stalled for four months because the city couldn’t get pipe.
There are more than 229 outstanding easements that have yet to be acquired for those outstanding projects. The employee who was working to obtain those easements left to take a better paying job in Florida, Martin said.
“That set us back six months,” he said. People are less and less willing to give the city even temporary easements to work on their property, Martin said.
Martin said he has already had informal conversations with Kentucky environmental regulators who have been understanding of the city’s predicament.
Those conversations have not yet started with the EPA, he said.
Other cities with consent decrees that require them to make necessary fixes to stormwater and sewer systems have been able to get extensions from the EPA under former President Donald Trump’s administration, he said.
At the time the 2008 consent decree was signed — after years of negotiations —“nobody could have predicted the impacts of a global pandemic,” Martin said.
‘I don’t see those cost savings continuing’
The city has completed 80% of the major projects in the consent decree. The city has also raised its sewer rates most recently in 2015 and 2019 to fund those major projects, Martin said.
Louisville, which is also under a federal consent decree, will likely have to ask for an extension from the EPA, he said, because a sewer rate hike has not passed and the city does not have money for the projects required under its consent decree.
Martin said many of the earlier projects such as the construction of more than 10 wet weather storage tanks came in under budget, shaving millions of dollars off of the projected cost. Now, sewage pipe replacement projects are coming in over budget.
PVC pipes are made from crude oil. Products made with crude oil have seen huge price jumps over the past 18 months, Martin said.
The city had projected to spend $426 million on EPA consent decree products by Sept. 31, 2021. It has spent $311 million.
“I don’t see those cost savings continuing,” Martin said.
If the city is not able to get an extension from federal environmental regulators, it could face steep fines for each project it does not complete, according to the consent decree, which was approved by a federal judge in 2011.
If the EPA and Kentucky state regulators agree to give the city an extension to finish all the projects, a federal judge must sign off on the new deadline, Martin said.
Martin said it’s likely the city will need at least two additional years to complete all the projects.
City officials are still examining the projects to determine how much additional time is needed. But that’s also tricky to predict given the supply chain problems, he said.
