CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – Wausau’s Water Works Commission, chaired by Mayor Katie Rosenberg, made another breathtaking blunder last week. They approved the broad framework of a ‘get the lead out’ initiative. It will remove the lead pipes that carry water from the main to your home.
This comes just a week after Mayor Rosenberg’s junket to Washington DC, where she got her marching orders from the Biden Administration. The unknowns surrounding the program are legion. We don’t know how much federal aid will be available. We don’t know how much homeowners will have to pay. We don’t know a timeline. We don’t even know if there’s enough local manpower to handle the replacement work.
What we do know is that the cost-per-home is $10,000.
And, at the meeting where the Water Works Commission voted ‘yes’, we heard this gem from our mayor: “I want to make sure the full costs don’t fall on the homeowners.” Which means they might. She simply doesn’t know.
I don’t know if my home has lead pipes or not. Let’s suppose I’m a lead-pipe loser, and $10,000 worth of plumbing work needs to be done at my property. I will stretch my imagination and suppose the most generous amount of aid is available: hypothetically, the government will cover two-thirds of the cost. Well that’s still a $3,500 surprise expense for me. So… I should forego my summer vacation to fix a problem that didn’t exist until the Mayor decided that this was a priority? Will I also have to pay for the mysterious ‘backwash’ to keep lead out of the sewer lines? Once water is the sewer system, it’s not part of the drinking water supply. Will there be any help to rebuild the stone retaining wall in my front yard. (I live on a hill; my water line is underneath the wall.)
You’d think that city leaders would have tabled a proposal will so many unknowns. Let’s know the costs first. Let’s find out how much aid is available. Let’s, perhaps, wait until new state or federal regulations are written, which hasn’t happened yet. And perhaps those regulations will be challenged in court and be struck down.
Instead Wausau is one of 100 communities that volunteered for the ‘get the lead out’ initiative, where almost all of the details are a mystery. A mayor who would voluntarily inflict such financial on homeowners is tone deaf. And as for the Water Works Commission that would vote for such a plan… well, it’s easy to jump into the great unknown with other people’s money.
Chris Conley
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