Man, pay me money dude

....I recently saw this on "Ask This Old House". An innovative and $$ saving way they addresed a lateral that became clogged w/ roots. Instead of having to dig/trench to get to the lateral, they utilized a product called Maxliner that should last ~50 years. I posted this on another forum and someone replied that this is the route/one of the options they are pursuing in WFB. Though, I have no idea if it is the exact same product/company

Very Interesting.....

If you do choose to watch the video, Click the arrow in the video to watch and then select scene #4 below to bypass the other 3 stories. Always something interesting on TOH/ATOH.

http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/tv/ask-toh/video/0,,20581468,00.html

Maxliner

http://www.maxlinerusa.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=43&Itemid=58

Looks like the Boys in the Hood get theirs repaired with our tax money and then we have to pay for ours.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/mmsd-approves-funds-for-private-sewer-repairs-in-city-q87pit1-180858601.html

AbsolutelyF - You are correct. As in the article, some (hopefully most) laterals will be lined with the same type product you saw on ThisOldHouse .. some laterals can be so broken that the liners can't get through .. those people will need to pay quite a bit more for replacement.

WPN - Sort of. MMSD collects sewer usage fees from the entire area .. they have a program whereby they grant the municipalities some of those funds for use on Private Property issues like laterals and sumps.

MMSD serves, what, 1.5 million people? Milwaukee having a population of 600k receives the lion's share of those funds, multi-millions per year. IIRC, WFB receives about $60k per year. That doesn't go very far. WFB used the funds for televising these laterals (a step that must be taken before lining.) .. So each homeowner in that area did receive a small benefit.

Bottom line .. MMSD funds don't go very far in WFB due to the small allocation. In Milwaukee, they can take their entire city-wide allocation and just spend it in one neighborhood, presto, they get "free" lateral repairs in that one area.

It seems that the Whitefish Bay Village Board has chosen 400 homeowners to cover the cost of an expensive experiment that may or may not be effective in resolving flooding issues. Wauwatosa is conducting a similar pilot program. However, the full cost of lining the sewer laterals for those 135 homes will be financed by the village and $500,000 from MMSD.
This is a village wide issue. A select group of homeowners shouldn't be responsible for covering the cost.

There seems to be a fault in the logic here. Infiltration from a storm event will have a time lag to get into sewer collection laterals, which are often 6-10' beneath the surface. The leakage won't start during the storm, but a few days after the event, and the peak flows (possible flooding), have already occurred. So in the end, this won't have much of an effect on the number of overflows to the lake. The only thing it might do is reduce the maintenance pumping cost to keep the storage system empty prior to the rain event. So in essence, the money spent here can be likened to having a fixed budget to insulate an uninsulated house to reduce bills, and spending all of the money insulating the walls, whilst the majority of the heat escapes through the ceiling/roof, and wondering why all the money you spent only effected the outcome (bill) in a very slight way. With budget, you address the items that will impact your outcome the most FIRST, then come back for the other stuff later.

Looking over the CIP program presentation, slide 5, of the listed contributors to clear water in the sanitary lines listed under the private connection bullet, sewer laterals offers the lowest amount of inflow out of all that are listed during a storm event. The Bay would be better served if it first addressed 1) illegal downspout connections and 2) perhaps getting the rest of the homes that still have a foundation drain connected to the santiary off of them. Since they appear to have no problem imposing costs on individual homeowners, they could have either incentivised this by imposing a water bill fee to encourage homeowners to make the disconnection, or come up with some other way to get the drain off of the sanitary system. The point about private drains connected to sanitary sewers is pretty vague, but perhaps that is referring to driveway and garage floor drains. I doubt garage floor drains are contributing much if this is what they meant. The point here is they are addressing the wrong contributor here, at high cost, to individual homeowners, and again, it appears to be the lowest contributor to clearwater in the sanitaries. We have until May 17 to get the to rethink the issue before they put it out to bid. After that, there may be no turning around from this mistake.

Hey, Jon.

I was on the board when this came up. In the end, I lobbied against this lateral plan for many of the same reasons you state above. The argument that won the day was the concept that .. nearly every private lateral in Bay is 80+ years old, clay pipe that's undoubtedly cracked by now. While no one likes to maintain these, at some point, every single lateral has to be replaced. About the best argument is "let's do it at 100 years instead!"

But as you said .. laterals are buried deeper, and the water from rain events don't get to them instantly, it takes hours for the water to seep down. It is possible (and I argued very likely) that once these 400 homes are repaired, the test results will not show the kind of massive improvement we need / the improvement that requiring sump pumps would yield. The Board was unwilling to force homeowners to go through the bigger hassle of having their basements ripped up for sumps.

As for illegal downspout connections .. last year the village had an engineer walk the entire village looking for them and compiled a list to follow up. There are indeed some, and they have been/are being addressed.