The last Shreveport City Council meeting on Thursday, Dec. 19, started off great.
In what has become a tradition, Ken Kreft read “The Night Before Christmas” poem and invited audience participation to finish verses.
It was good fn.
But then the Christmas Scrooge and the Grinch arrived. The big lumps of coal they left were not welcomed. And they will still be around in January, and the months, maybe years, like a never-ending hangover.
The consent decree entered into by the city of Shreveport and the U.S. Department of Justice to resolve Clean Water Act violations was the topic of the lengthy, detailed Powerpoint presentation by two representatives of the project consent decree manager, Burns & McDonnell. (Burns)
The news started off bad. And then it went to worse.
In summary, compliance with the consent decree will be virtually impossible for the city.
Initially, the cost was estimated to be $5350 million. This year the estimate was upped to $1 billion.
At the briefing the new guesstimate was $1.3 to $1.5 billion.
The compliance timeline is also a virtually impossible challenge, especially after analysis of the impact of the Phase 1 work.
Basically, this construction has had very limited impact on the intended goal of reducing sanitary sewer overflows (SSO).
The hydraulic model, which was not developed by Burns, is basically a dud. And the phase 1, phase 2 and phase 3 construction plans and specifications have been based on this defective model.
And that’s only the first major challenge.
The financial analysis by Burns was also quite telling — in a very negative way. The phased-in increases in Shreveport water rates will not come close to footing the bill for the projected expenses. And the incomes of Shreveport citizens cannot justify rate increases to pay the tab.
Burns said that aggressive negotiation with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Justice must be aggressively pursued — and that this was a long-term process.
Shreveport Mayor Perkins advised the council that special legal counsel had been retained for this purpose.
What was not discussed at the meeting was the political option, that being to plead the city’s case to U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson, U.S. Sen. John Kennedy, and U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy. They are all Republicans along with President Donald Trump.
The EPA has not been a favorite agency of the president, to say the least.
Politics are politics, and 2020 is a presidential election year. If there is ever a perfect time to pull the political levers it is now.
This Article was published in the December 27th issue of The Inquisitor.