Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Editor’s Note: A change was made to clarify City Manager Chris Duque did not recommend postponing action items but sought to see if city council wanted to vote on any actions to move the meeting along based on citizen feedback.

Nederland City Council held its last meeting before early voting starts and provided updates on the city’s wastewater issues and addressed concerns from citizens.

The meeting was set for council members to receive an update from city staff and Schaumberg & Polk, a civil engineering firm, about possible actions to take to address the city’s wastewater issues that have been reported to be causing toilet paper and wastewater to overflow onto the streets and other residential areas whenever it rained. Some residents report having issues since 2018.

These agenda action items were requested after various citizens have packed Nederland city hall for the past 3 meetings to voice their concern and frustration with the wastewater issues. 

The city originally had 3 items on the agenda to act on recommendations from reports from Schaumburg & Polk. The report examined roughly 20% of the city that encompassed the west part of the city according to a representative of Schaumburg & Polk, Steve Jordan. The testing was done via smoke testing, with releases non non-toxic smoke into the sewage system to identify any leaks or other defects in the system.

The original recommendation from Schaumburg & Polk was to replace and rebuild almost 11,000 ft of gravity sewage line that was estimated to cost the city $5,648,760 for the 20% of the city that was tested. Testing for the whole city was requested by city council but was limited in scope due to the urgency that city staff had to address the issue according to City Manager Chris Duque. A budget request will be made to city council to test the entire city at a later date due to the cost.

Discussion on this topic went back and forth between city council and citizens on how Schaumburg & Polk or the city itself would be able to fix and address these issues and what that would look like.

“Whatever is going on with this back and forth, let’s be as ugly as we can, let’s shut people down stuff that is going on and it’s gotta stop, or this problem is not going to be fixed,” said Nederland resident Angela Fanette.”We all have to be part of it: citizens, council and staff. And if you’re not willing to do it, you are going to spend a whole lot of money and nothing is going to change.” 

After an hour of discussion, Duque paused discussion on the sewage issues to see if city council wanted to table the immediate action items and have Schaumburg & Polk test the entire city before approving any action to immediately begin work on the city’s sewage system and do so “as quickly as possible” based on citizen feedback. The possible cost of testing and replacing would significantly increase from the $5.6 million cost to cover the remaining 80% of the city. 

All item actions were eventually tabled for a later date after city-wide testing until after the election on the city council meeting after the May 19 city council meeting.