South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is planning a trip to D.C. in the next couple of weeks.
The reason is to talk to lawmakers about the financial burden placed on cities like South Bend to abide by the government’s wastewater policies. The City entered an agreement in 2011 with the Environmental Protection Agency mandating changes that would cost the city upwards of $1 billion.
“We’ve got these older systems and when it rains too much, you have untreated stuff going into the river, which is not good,” Mayor Buttigieg recently told 95.3 MNC. “The problem is it’s incredibly expensive to fix.”
Mayor Buttigieg says researchers have figured out how to get it done for half that amount.
“We have 100,000 people in the city. So you take that $500 million, and that is thousands of dollars for every one of us. We’ve done the engineering that says we can have clean water for much less money. Now comes the hard part, which is we need to go to the federal government and say ‘give us a chance.'”
The goal of the changes is to reduce the amount of sewage that goes into the St. Joseph River during major storms. The federal government needs to approve the new plan before the work can be done. The cost would still trickle down to South Bend residents’ sewer bills.
