Fines growing daily for Hattiesburg

From staff reports | Hattiesburg American

Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

When it comes to the City of Hattiesburg and its poisonous wastewater disposal system, so many countdowns have come and gone, it's simply alarming.

Seemingly dozens of dolorous deadlines have passed, papered over like 11th-hour pardons packed with extensions and extra time and amended solutions and coerced compromises.

The result: Alleged answers considered and discarded; decisions delayed; conversation behind closed doors in executive session; mounting mounds of money for consultants and lawyers and the like.

And still the pollution pours into the Leaf.

And that stinks.

The long-term cost to the city has not been weighed fully. Not yet.

Estimated costs floated for either a mechanical solution or land-application dispersal fall between $100 million and $200 million, and one would not think that a project essentially correcting nearly a half century of indifference, ignorance and neglect would skew toward the lesser expensive.

Bottom line for any hooked into the Hattiesburg sewer system: Any fix comin' ain't going to come cheap.

The environmental impact remains uncalculated as well, perhaps a task incalculable.

But, at the very least, the cost of the latest procrastination has been weighed and the dollar wheel set a-spinning.

The city missed a Sept. 1 court-ordered deadline to have design plans finalized and submitted to not only the appropriate state and federal agencies for approval but also to the U.S. District Court that is overseeing a suit brought by an environmental advocacy organization based in New Orleans.

As a result, since Sept. 1, the city has been fined $1,500 a day, every day, and will continue to be fined $1,500 a day, every day, until plans for a solution are finalized and submitted.

That's $1,500 a day, every day, of taxpayer money, our money, flushed down the drain like the foul water running through the river.

That's beyond a shame. That's shameful.

The city recently raised millage rates for the first time in many years to raise revenue for one of the most basic of expected city services: upkeep and repair of Hattiesburg's streets, avenues, boulevards, roads and lanes.

As you read this, the city already has wasted $124,500. Thirty days hath September, October ended with Halloween on the 31st and we're 22 days into November. Eighty-three days where the city was fined $1,500 a day, every day.

Now, $124,500 may not go very far when it comes to spreading asphalt and filling potholes and the like, but that accumulated fine, each day, every day, is adding up and is only going to grow larger.

The city already has been told by its engineering consultant on the project that the earliest — the very earliest — plans could be finalized for a mechanical solution, would be the end of the year.

That's 122 days, and that's $183,000 that will be gone, just gone.

Yes, we've heard the murmurs that a possible land-application solution — whose plans are not only developed but a state-approved operating license already granted — may be slipped in to replace the mechanical.

If true, and if approved, that indeed could put a halt to the city being fined $1,500 a day, every day.

But we're not holding our breath, though we must gratefully say that we're not holding our noses of late, thanks in large part to the pretreatment system for USA Yeast's effluent.

The city has continued to slap the snooze button on a situation that was an issue before Hurricane Katrina and absolute obliviousness created a crisis that now is costing the city $1,500 of taxpayer dollars a day, every day.

Tick-tock, indeed.