Stock Islanders must get connected to sewer
BY BECKY IANNOTTA
Citizen Staff
STOCK ISLAND — Dozens
of cockroaches scurry away as a backhoe shoves aside a concrete cover,
revealing an underground tank full of raw sewage.
A 3-inch hose
connected to a tanker truck sucks the sludge from the septic tank.
Plumbing contractor Jay Miller maneuvers the backhoe to crush the
concrete sides and bottom of the tank and fill the hole with rocks and
dirt. The demolition is the plumber's last task after connecting the
mobile home to Stock Island's central sewer system.
The county is under a
state mandate to eliminate by 2010 an estimated 7,000 or more of these
holes in the ground, which have been blamed for fecal matter being
detected in nearshore waters surrounding the Keys.
Three years after
county commissioners declared the $4 million Stock Island project
complete — three months ahead of schedule and $400,000 under budget —
fewer than 500 of 1,250 hookups are in place (another 250 are reserved
for future development). During the same period, residents in Bay Point,
Conch Key, Key Largo Trailer Village, Key Largo Park, northern
Islamorada and Layton have installed pipes on their properties
connecting to sewer mains that carry wastewater to a central sewage
plant.
Only the Stock Island
project has been the subject of a grand jury investigation, a county
audit and three engineering reviews. County engineers say they are
satisfied that contractor KW Resort Utilities built an adequate system
of pipes and tanks under public streets to which landowners can run a
pipe to the property line and connect.
Now reluctant property
owners just need to move forward, said county sewer engineer Elizabeth
Wood.
Most of the holdouts
involve mobile home parks, whose owners say installing pipes and sewage
holding tanks to connect to the central sewer is too expensive or
impossible because the infrastructure is not there.
Wood said she has
reviewed the plans, and service is available as required by Monroe
County and state codes in all but four cases: the Oropeza building,
Metro Self-Storage, El Mar Trailer Park, and Key West Oxygen and
Victorian Vehicles.
"When you do
construction projects, there are contingencies. We all recognize this,"
she said last week. "It's not that the infrastructure isn't in place.
The infrastructure they need is there."
County code
enforcement officers have cited 61 property owners who failed to connect
to the system. Special Magistrate J. Jefferson Overby heard some of the
cases April 27, but postponed ruling on them until a hearing Wednesday.
Many of the cases have been continued two or three times since last
summer.
Donald Jonas, owner of
the Cayo Hueso mobile home park where Miller completed installation of
the sewer pipes and vacuum pits last week, is among the property owners
cited for not connecting to the sewer system last summer.
Jonas hopes a county
hearing officer on Wednesday will forgive $24,000 in code violations
that accumulated before he connected his property to the central sewer
system.
He said controversy
over the sewer project, which triggered a grand jury finding that the
county failed to adequately protect property owners and had been
negligent in its oversight, led him to delay spending the $150,000 to
$175,000 on connecting the 10 trailers on his property into the sewer
system.
"I waited as long as I
could because of the way they went about it," said the fisherman, who
purchased the waterfront mobile home park for $150,000 in 1983. "Hey,
what do you do? When the government tells you to do it, you got to do
it."
Jonas praised Miller
for his work, but said hooking into the sewer system was "a mess."
It started with his
first correspondence from the county two years ago, telling him he had
30 days to tie into the new system.
"They all think
because I own the park, I'm rich. But I've got to work," he said, adding
that he took out a second mortgage to pay for the sewers and raised
rents by $150 per month. At every turn he faced charges for permits:
$500 from the health department, $1,000 from the state Department of
Environmental Protection. He also encountered additional charges for
equipment and work that wasn't included in his engineer's original
plans, he said.
"I don't know why the
different agencies didn't know, it seems like they were just learning
it," he said.
Now that the system is
in place, KW Resort Utilities wants an easement to his property so they
can maintain his sewer lines, he said. Like others who connect to the
system, he also paid the utility 10 percent of his project's cost for
engineering work, in addition to the engineer he hired.
While connecting new
pipes at the Cayo Hueso mobile home park to Stock Island's sewer system,
Miller's crew stood in the trenches within inches of raw sewage seeping
from old, cracked concrete tanks in the ground.
Two of the 10 septic
tanks they crushed and filled didn't have bottoms, which over the years
could have allowed sewage to wash into the water table that starts about
2 feet underground.
"We live on a sponge,
basically," said Miller. "Seawater is pouring into those pits."
County engineers are
frustrated by the number of people who still have not connected to the
sewer system, constructed under county contract by KW Resort Utilities.
They also worry that
more than $500,000 in grant funding from the state Department of
Community Affairs to help residents with sewer costs will go unspent by
an October deadline.
The money is meant to
offset a mandatory $2,700 user fee and the additional cost of putting
new pipes on private property.
"I'm concerned that if
we don't get this wrapped up by October, we're not going to get this
money again," Wood said.
Mobile home park
owners have balked at the cost of connecting to the sewer.
In addition to the
$2,700 user fee for each unit, it can cost hundreds of thousands of
dollars to install pipes and accompanying tanks, which hold sewage and
then pump it along to the main system.
The costs depend on
the size of the mobile home park and whether there is an existing system
other than the septics.
Chris Johnson,
president of Keys Environmental, which operates the sewer system for KW
Resort Utilities, said property owners are talking about prices without
getting an engineer to draw up plans for their properties.
"People are trying to
get bids without having designs," Johnson said.
"No engineer has
looked at the plans and said this can't be done."
riannotta@keysnews.com |
