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Issue: 1138 Date: 6/14/2012
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Big MSD bond issue easily passes in St. Louis
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ST. LOUIS - A $945 million bond issue for work to reduce the flow of untreated sewage into the Mississippi River was adopted by 85 percent of votes cast in Tuesday's special election.
To pay for the bonds, the Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District intends to boost sewer bills this summer and raise them annually in future years. The bond issue was sold as a way to soften the hit as MSD begins a $4.7 billion, 23-year project it agreed in federal court to undertake.
"Voters spoke nearly unanimously in saying they prefer lower rates," said Mike Kelley, campaign manager for the bond issue.
With the bonds, MSD intends to boost sewer bills 9 percent effective July 1. By 2015, rates will be 52 percent higher than they are now.
Without bonds, the district warned, it would have to raise rates 123 percent immediately to generate enough cash for the $218 million in construction planned for the first year.
Clean Water STL, the bond-issue campaign committee, promoted the slower rate of increases. But MSD officials confirm that rates will be higher by at least 2020 because of the bond issue than they would have been through the harder immediate hit of the straight-cash route.
With all of the votes counted in St. Louis city and county, the vote was 63,163 to 11,032 in favor. Voters also gave similar margins of approval to eight proposed amendments to MSD's operating charter.
MSD requested authority for the bonds to cover the first four years of its promise to drastically reduce sewage overflows during rainstorms. MSD agreed to those terms to settle a lawsuit filed in 2007 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and others. A federal judge adopted the plan in April.
The bond issue and the eight amendments were the only matters on the ballot within the district, which includes the city and all but far west county. Voter turnout was light throughout the district.
Only 9 percent of all registered voters within MSD boundaries decided a nearly billion-dollar question.
MSD says the current average monthly single-family sewer bill is $28.73. The planned increases will boost that to $31.34 next month and $43.67 effective July 1, 2015.
Had voters rejected the bond issue, MSD says, the average monthly bill would have been $64.15 this summer.
MSD estimates that average monthly bills will be about $80 per month by 2020 to continue paying off bonds. Without bonds, MSD said, bills still would be about $65 monthly, not counting inflation, by 2020.
The difference is that bond financing roughly doubles the cost by the time bonds are paid off, MSD officials said. The district still is to decide whether to seek 20-year or 30-year payouts.
The MSD Board of Trustees is to meet June 14 to set rates for the next four years. In March, trustees hired a consulting firm to recommend rates for 2016 and later years.
The goal is to fix an old problem. St. Louis and many of its older suburbs have combined sewers, which mix sewage and rainwater in the mains headed for treatment plants. Heavy storms overwhelm that system, causing overflows into open streams - the biggest example being the River Des Peres.
Most newer suburbs have separate systems for sewage and storm water. But mixing occurs even in many of those areas. Overwhelmed mains in both systems can cause basement backups.
The $4.7 billion goal in 2010 dollars is intended to fix problems in both kinds of systems. About $1.9 billion is aimed at the combined-sewer areas. The biggest single project will be the boring of a nine-mile tunnel deep beneath the River Des Peres to store storm runoff until it can be pumped to the Lemay treatment plant.
But the project list includes the replacement of inadequate pipe through the system, upgrades to treatment plants and elimination of "overflows," where the two flows mix during storms.
MSD says it already has spent $2.5 billion since 1992 eliminating overflow points.
(St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 6, 2012) |
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