Sump pump, line inspections will be mandatory before home sales in Duluth – West Central Tribune

Local governments also will need to make sure the property's lateral line the sewer pipe that leads from the house to the street isn't letting clean water leak into the sewer system.

Both requirements are part of a new ordinance expected to pass the WLSSD board at their regular monthly meeting Monday, June 26.

City officials, Realtors and home sellers can relax for the time being, however. WLSSD wants cities and townships have those new rules on the books by Feb. 15, 2019, and enforced by Feb.15, 2020. (Earlier drafts called for the ordinance to take effect as early as next year.)

Still, the new rule is coming, and cities and townships will have to ramp up their inspection services at a cost to home sellers and/or taxpayers. With big downstream fixes in place, the WLSSD says now the best way to keep clean water out is upstream, at the start of the collection system, where homes and businesses send their sewage into pipes that flow down each street.

Specifically, WLSSD is requiring cities and townships in its service area to pass their own ordinances requiring the owners of homes or other buildings connected to the sewer system obtain a certificate, before selling that property, that shows the sump pump is not contributing clean water to the sewage system.

If the system is dumping water into the sewer, the home would have to be disconnected within 120 days of the title transfer. The fix can either be part of the sale price or, if it doesn't happen within 120 days, the municipality can assess a fee or surcharge on the property's tax bill.

Either way, homes needing disconnects will pay.

Duluth halfway there

The so-called point of sale rule for sump pump/foundation drain disconnects from the sewage system has been required in Duluth since 2011. But it will be a new requirement for all home and building sellers outside the city whose homes send wastewater to the WLSSD plant in Lincoln Park.

The WLSSD area includes Duluth, Proctor, Hermantown, Wrenshall, Rice Lake, Carlton, Scanlon, Cloquet, the Village of Oliver in Wisconsin, Midway, Thomson and Twin Lakes townships in Minnesota, as well as areas served by the Pike Lake and Larsmont sewage districts.

"The district has been good about backing off on their timeline to help their customers," said Caleb Peterson, Cloquet's director of Public Works. "But these are big changes coming down the line that are going to cost money. We realize it's going to be more work. ... But we also realize there's still an issue with inflow and infiltration we have to get to."

Eric Shaffer, Duluth's chief engineer for utilities, said the city's current program of inspecting sump pump and storm drain disconnects before home sales "should meet the (new) WLSSD requirement." Already "if you sell your home today in the city, it will need a foundation drain/sump pump inspection."

It will be up to each municipality to decide how to handle the lateral line issue. Small municipalities with fewer home sales may decide to require lateral inspections at the time of sales, just like the sump pump/foundation drain inspection. But larger cities, especially Duluth, probably will comply with the new WLSSD ordinance by ramping up lateral line inspection programs where the city inspects entire neighborhoods for lateral line leakage.

"We are trying to be as flexible as possible and still reach the goal of reducing those peak flows," said Karen Anderson, WLSSD spokeswoman.

Duluth could never afford to inspect lateral lines for the roughly 1,200 buildings sold each year, city officials noted. The most the city ever accomplished was 275 in one year.

Shaffer said Duluth will have to ramp up lateral line inspections across the entire city, reaching more than 100 homes annually, to satisfy the WLSSD ordinance. The city can do the work using remote-controlled cameras that snake through the sewage system, from a manhole in the street to residents' homes. On rainy days, crews can easily see which lateral lines are allowing water to pour in.

At that point, the city can require homeowners to stop the lateral line leaks, which can cost upwards of $5,000 to either dig up and replace or re-line leaky pipes. In past years, the city offered grants of up to $4,000. But there's currently no money in the city budget to continue those grants. That would be up to the mayor and city council to decide. If the city agreed with WLSSD to fix 100 leaky lateral lines annually, for example, that would be a $400,000 cost to the city.

Over the past decade, Duluth, WLSSD and other municipalities in the area have spent millions of dollars to try to solve the problem of clean rainwater and snowmelt entering and overwhelming the sewage system. That overload caused overflows of untreated sewage into local streams and Lake Superior.

Expensive fix, but overflows have mostly ended

WLSSD and cities have expanded pipelines, added new pumps and built giant storage basins to hold the extra water that enters the system during heavy rains or spring thaws. The last big overflow tank, above the Lakewalk near Endion Station, was completed in early 2012. It cost $20 million and holds 8.2 million gallons.

All told, the city has put more than $126 million into the effort, and WLSSD has spent another $40 million, with local taxes and state and federal grants helping foot the bill. Those numbers are for major capital expenses and don't count the city's contribution to sump pump installations in homes.

To a large extent, the effort has worked well. The only major sewage overflow into local waters in recent years was during the June 2012 flood, a 1-in-500-years event.

Still, millions of gallons of clean water are getting into the system after every rain. Anderson said peak flows during heavy rainfall and snowmelt events can reach eight times the dry-weather flow of wastewater to the plant, and overflows could still occur.

City officials said they had some overflows on their end of the system during a rain event on frozen ground in March 2016, with the water coming from private homes and other buildings, not leaky city pipes or manholes.

The ordinance being voted on Monday is not the first local rule requiring sewage inspection before building sales.

St. Louis County has had rules on the books for decades requiring septic system inspections at the time of rural home sales, but the rule was rarely enforced because of the high cost of new septic systems. In 2014, the county moved to require sellers of homes with uninspected septic systems to set up an escrow account to pay for a new system if it's not working properly to treat sewage, a potential pollution problem for nearby waterways or wells. The escrow essentially applies to any home sales where the septic system hasn't been tested or replaced in the past 10 years. In reality, escrows will be used only in winter, when the ground is frozen and septic tests can't be done before the sale.

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Sump pump, line inspections will be mandatory before home sales in Duluth - West Central Tribune