City engineer Travis Winter.

What would be worse? “Catastrophic failure” due to a neglected underground utility system, or receiving an average $205.68 per year tax levy increase- with an added overall average of $28.75 per month water usage fee? This is what the Winnebago City Council pondered last Tuesday during their meeting.

Public Works members Darold Niehaus, Rick Mauris and Clint Eastman were the first group of three presenters to share information regarding the current state of Winnebago’s underground pipes for water and waste water.

Eastman spoke to the damage of the current pipes on Second Avenue.

“There is a manhole that has frozen over the past three years, causing the 10 inch (wide) pipe to split to the point where we can’t fit a six inch camera in the pipe to take pictures of it,” he said.

Mauris was eager to discuss the concerns as to what materials the current piping is made.?

“A lot of pipe around First Avenue Northwest is made of four inch asbestos concrete, [and] there are a lot of service lines in the northwest part of town that are made of lead and may have lead in them. We don’t know for sure,” he added.As Travis Winter, city engineer, took his place at the podium, he shared the preliminary engineering report for the northwest area street and utility project. The project specifically targets the region west of highway 69 and north of Jackson Road, all in all a 25 block radius.

“There have been a number of issues studied as far back as 1983 in that area. Improvements were set to take place in the early 2000’s but were not completed,” explained Winter.

“The existing conditions are 25 blocks worth of roads, and under all of that, 10 inch to 24 inch partially collapsed clay and concrete pipe,” he said.

“This pipe is structurally unsound and is pending some serious failures in the near future. A collapse could mean major maintenance and create water back up in homes. We need to figure out a way to correct this.”

Winter went on to reiterate the concerns mentioned by Mauris.

“The water system in itself with the asbestos cement pipe and lead water service pipes are known health risks,” he said, “those materials were taken out of water systems a long time ago because of that risk. In their day, they were used quite significantly and a large part of this town has asbestos cement pipe. This is something we’re going to be dealing with in the future, not just with this project.”

The proposed improvements, as they currently stand, consist of three phases. Within those phases, the project team hopes to replace all the streets with new blacktop roads, new curb and gutters, new reinforced concrete pipes, new PVC pipes for the sanitary sewer and water systems, replacing all hydrant valves in the area, and a dry basin detention pond in a low lying area to help with water surges during heavy rainfall.

“All in all,” says Winter, “we have $3.3 million designated to streets, over $1 million to wastewater, nearly $1 million for water systems, and $1.2 million for sewer systems, generating a total of $6.6 million.”

The phases mentioned for the project would separate the grand total into three smaller totals. The phases are split into costs of $2.6 million, $2.2 million, and the third phase costing $1.8 million.

Winter mentioned the estimates of the project were not over estimated, but created to give longevity to the integrity of the pipelines to create minimal maintenance in the future.

“So, the recommendations we’ve come up with are there because we feel there’s potential for catastrophic failure in the near future if this continues to be neglected. Doing the work sooner rather than later is extremely important; reason being favorable construction prices and interest rates are low at this time. There’s never been a time like the present to make improvements,” were Winter’s last statements before bond consultant Steven Mattson took to the podium.

Mattson is with Northland Securities and has been a bond consultant for 42 years. He explained this was “not his first rodeo” and he would do his best to break the bond issue conversation into “Peter Rabbit English” for all at the meeting to understand.

Mattson began with bond estimations for 2016, 2017 and 2018, if Winnebago chose to utilize all three years.

“Travis has an estimate of $6.6 million in construction costs, but with bonding costs and the construction added interest cost, you’re looking at close to $7 million,” he said. “The average sewer and water bill would have to go up $18.30, storm sewer would have to go up about $10.45 and the tax levy would go up $140,900 a year. Again, these are totals from 2016, 2017, and 2018 bond issues.”

“The sewer and water rates would increase as well as would tax levy increases and if you live in the northwest part of town, you would be a part of an assessment process,” explained Mattson.

If broken down, for the year of 2016, the average person’s bill would increase $7.80 per month for sewer and water, and $5.10 per month for storm sewer usage, increasing slightly beyond that in 2017 and 2018.

Mattson then went into detail on tax increases.

“You’ll see in our tax levy estimates for the next twenty years; if your home costs an average of $100,000, the tax capacity value for that house is $1000. Based upon the tax increases specifically for those three bond issues, the average, over 20 years, is going to be about $205 a year increase in taxes. This averages to about $17.14 a month over that 20 year period. That’s everybody in town that’s paying taxes. It’s not just the northwest side of town. It includes commercial and industrial properties as well.”

Mattson’s wise finishing advice was a “pay me now or pay me later” sentiment.

“If we let this go just another couple of years, the costs would increase and it could be catastrophic for the town,” he said. “It could be miserable. It’s a question of do we inflict this pain (of tax increase) or not, and we’re at the point where we almost have to.”