City Authorizes Funding for Sewer Inspections in Expanded Area

Residents in six selected areas of Brookfield will be eligible for grants to inspect and fix their sewer laterals and other connections this spring and summer.

The city Water and Sewer Board authorized the funding at a meeting Tuesday, expanding an existing pilot program meant to address overflows of untreated sewage and stormwater, under . 

"It will help the city to size up the problem, and it will help individual residents to get some of those problems fixed," Trustee Scott Berg said. 

The started with the Adelaide and Robinwood neighborhoods last year, and will expand to areas categorized as Brookfield Road, Center/Arbor, Ponoma Road and Indianwood. Eligible residents will be contacted by the city, and can attend an informational meeting April 24 at 7 p.m. in the Public Safety Building.

The funding for the newly eligible residencies will be similar to those in the pilot program, where volunteer residents may have to bear some of the cost of repairs but will receive grants from the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District. MMSD has a pot of about $600,000 from the city to be used this year for these projects, which will be conducted by Brown and Caldwell, a private engineering firm.

Homeowners who are found to need sewer repairs would be eligible to receive half to full reimbursement — up to $10,000 — from those funds.

The purpose of the project is to identify cracked laterals or other connections that could be allowing ground water and storm water to enter sanitary sewers, taking up volume and forcing backups of sewage into basements.

The EPA order, which does not specify a dollar number the city must spend, says Brookfield diverted untreated sewage and storm water into local waterways 46 times between January 2004 and Feb. 28, 2011. A total of 6,461,910 gallons in seven years was diverted to tributaries leading to the Fox River or Lake Michigan.

The EPA did not issue similar orders to other municipalities served by the regional sewer treatment plant that Brookfield operates, although some have also had repeated overflows. Brookfield was targeted because it operates the plant located in the city, called the Fox River Water Pollution Control Center, according to Thomas Grisa, director of the public works department. The western half of the city's sewage is treated by that plant, while sewage on the east side of Brookfield goes to the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sanitary District plant.