Stormwater Utility

We need to establish a stormwater utility in Frankfort, which will save taxpayers millions of dollars.

Frankfort has been sued by the State because our stormwater feeds into our sewer system (in violation of Environmental Protection Agency guidelines), causing waste to occasionally overflow into our streets and into the river. We are required to seperate the systems by specific deadlines, with significant fines for each missed deadline. We've actually had since 1996 to start working on this, but the city failed to take any action at all for about ten years. Now the deadlines are looming, and we're finding ourselves between a rock and a hard place.

This separation will leave our stormwater with no place to go. This means flooded streets and basements in almost every neighborhood in town. We need to develop a new branch of services to handle all the stormwater before this upcoming problem becomes a crisis. I propose the creation of a stormwater utility to handle the problem. This will help local taxpayers by requiring otherwise tax-exempt entities to shoulder their fair share of the financial burden of stormwater services.

We can't choose to not address this problem, because we're under a court order. The creation of a utility is the only alternative to spending tax money from the general fund to address the stormwater problem. A utility can collect fees from bodies that otherwise don't have to pay taxes (and that contribute to over 60% of our stormwater problem). If we don’t pay for the project through a utility, then the entire financial burden will be on local taxpayers instead of being divided more evenly throughout the city.