With our Inflow and Infiltration (I/I) project we were awarded the low interest loan to start a major disconnection program of people’s weep tiles in their homes from our sanitary sewer system.
As posted previously, to disconnect all the homes in the city and to upgrade some of our storm sewer system the price tag was $24 million. We could do that if it was a State or Federal Grant program. But no such $$$ is there in grants.
City Council has attempted to find a way to help us come more in line with the Federal, State, and County mandate to remove rain water from our sanitary sewer flows, but $24 million is more expensive than we could afford to do.
The next plan was “biggest bang for the bucks spent”. This was a $10 million plan and take 4 years to implement.
Again, the only funding we qualified for are loans so we have to pay back the funds and a ten million dollar debt is still pretty steep.
What the city council agreed with moving forward was a $2.7 million, two year project that removes approximately 300 home’s rain water from our sanitary system. At the same time we we are going to enforce our ordinances and have people bring their systems up to today’s standards when they pull sewer permits. We would also continue to monitor the system to ensure we lowered the amount of rain water as predicted and mandated.
The MDEQ like our project plan and we could back up our thought process to explain how we got here. The state approved us getting the low interest loan (1.67%). Things are moving along nicely and we are meeting the required paperwork deadlines thanks to our consultants 
and staff.
It seems like there is always a monkey wrench that gets thrown into these projects. DEQ would like us to do the 4 year $10 million project. We explained that we would too, but we can not afford it. They said money is not an issue.
WHAT?
Of course money is an issue, unless they are giving us the extra funds to do the larger project (they are not).
So we will continue on, and we get to go to Lansing to try to find the common ground.