To kick-off their campaign to implement their plan to require homeowners to ask permission to sell their homes, the local sewer districts spoke publicly for the first time to our local newspaper in an effort to spin public opinion to their way of thinking.
While the story was well written by Oroville Mercury-Register reporter Mary Weston, it i
s quite obvious from its content that the Lake Oroville Area Public Utility District (LOAPUD) was less than forthcoming about what their true intentions are.
Take a look at the article and see for yourself ,and then be sure to read the rest of my commentary.
Click here to read story
What LOAPUD failed to tell reporter Weston is that they in fact have no program in place to provide assistance to homeowners to fix leaky laterals. They also failed to mention that leaky laterals may be less than half the problem with sewer capacity as they readily admit that half the problem may be with their own main line. Yet they claim they have no money to fulfill their duty to maintain their OWN lines. Which by the way, is the reason we pay our sewer fees.
They also failed to disclose that they intend to interfere in the sale of any home in the district by not allowing the sale to happen until the seller pays to have costly lateral testing done at the homeowners expense, which could result in some homes not being able to be sold at all.
They also failed to say that a homeowner will have to pay for the same costly lateral test whenever a permit is issued for any repairs or improvement being done on the home. For example, replacing a $600 water heater could end up costing thousands of dollar due to lateral test and potential repair costs.
Once again, they failed to mention that Ordinance 1-09 of the Comprehensive Sewer Rules and Regulations, which mandates these onerous and archaic rules is set to be implemented in the coming days.
Mr. Brown and his board also don’t tell you that this ordinance creates undue discrimination against home sellers and those homeowners who keep their homes maintained while potentially allowing major polluters to continue to pollute.
This ordinance does nothing to address the issue they are trying to resolve. It simply creates more problems. It is quite frankly a big smoke screen (pardon the pun) designed to place the burden created by their own lack of maintenance and poor planning upon homeowners who are already footing the bill for the district’s incompetence.
This type of ordinance has had devastating financial consequences in nearly every place that hit has been tried. For each of the two districts that are touted in the article as ‘models’ for what is being forced upon us here, there are many more sewers districts across this country that have abandoned the program after seeing is negative impact.
Even the districts in the Lake Tahoe Basin, one of the most environmentally sensitive areas in the country, have opted out of such ordinances because it have been proven that it DOES NOT WORK.
Homeowners in the all three sewer districts of the Oroville real estate market need to make their voices heard and stop enactment of this ordinance and all ordinances like it.
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The District did not eliminate this requirement at all. We modified the ordinance because we were not experiencing infiltration/inflow as we had in the past. Our Ordinance has been in place 30 years and has addressed the vast majority of structurally deficient sewer laterals. The ordinance was modified to lengthen the time between testing once the older and poorly constructed service laterals had been replaced. The District is taking a different approach to addressing system infiltration. A more proactive approach that does not wait for property sales. The District has the authority to enforce this rule at any time and will begin to look at areas of risk of infiltration and then require property owners to address the substandard connection to the Districts system. Finally, the Ordinance allowed the District to mitigate the vast majority of the infiltration of water into the sanitary sewer system by replacing orangeburg pipe and or other failing lateral materials with properly constructed and approved materials.
Curtis:
Thanks very much for commenting and clarifying your lateral testing program. Sorry if I may have worded my blog post in a way that may lead some to believe that you have no lateral testing program. I should have been more clear in stating that using the home sales approach, or Point of Sale approach, would be an inefficient and incomplete way of dealing with this issue and not one that most districts, including yours, favor. I would be very interested in knowing the specifics of your district’s approach to this issue.