In October 2023, city staff recommended diverting costs and work for alley repairs of the lateral sewer lines that connect private homes to the public main sewer line to private plumbing contractors.
The change was made in the hopes of saving the city around $800,000 and sending the city’s Public Works crews back to other maintenance jobs, such as fire hydrants.
But that didn’t last long. After the shift went into effect in January, citizens reported being hit with expensive bills for the repair. In April, the city council reversed the decision back to the city’s responsibility until further analysis could be taken on the issue, calling for a committee of citizens and plumbers to provide recommendations on the next steps for the city.
After ten meetings and 410 collective manhours, the committee of citizens from each district and four of Lubbock’s private plumbers, with the help of city staff, made their recommendations to the city council this week on how to address the question of who is responsible for the cost and repair of Lubbock’s private sewer lines in the public right-of-way.
As the meetings came to a close, committee chair Jeff Reese said the group tried to approach this process with equity as a primary focus.
“We've really tried to do a good job of representing all the stakeholders: the city, the plumbing groups, and the citizens,” Reese said. “And more important in that is trying to look at this through the eyes of the average citizen.”
Hearing from some who believed it should be a simple question and getting into the details on many of their concerns, the committee agreed on some issues and disagreed on others, but Committee chair Jeff Reese told the city council one thing has been undeniable.
“The ‘who pays’ question leads to two conflicting points of view regarding the financial responsibility: let the city pay for all of it and raise rates to pay for it, or let the property owner pay for all of it, often resulting in financial hardship,” Reese said. “After those 410 man hours, we do not believe that it’s a simple answer.”
Referring to both homeowners and the city as equal stakeholders in the issue, the committee recommended a shared responsibility by asking that the city cover some costs through a one-time subsidy of up to $2,500 per property owner for approved projects.
This subsidy would be paid directly to the contractor on behalf of the property owner, with the property owner being financially responsible for the remaining cost.
Those who wouldn’t be eligible for the subsidy include commercial property owners and homeowners the city determines to be at fault for the line break due to pipe strikes, warranty failures, and “inappropriate materials introduced into the pipe.”
‘Steeped in misinformation’
One of the committee's recommendations was for better communication from the city regarding changes to processes that impact many current and future residents, such as plumbing. Reese said the sources of the misunderstandings weren’t limited to the city, but the city can make its own efforts to improve citizen information.
“I also read and watched every news story I could find on this topic in the city of Lubbock. There is so much misinformation,” Reese said. “Frequently in our committee meetings, I was using the whiteboard, and I would write the word ‘communication’ and I would circle it in red because we did not handle this well, and we must do so going forward.”
Another recommendation from the committee included coverage for those residents “caught in the gap” between the city’s decision to shift responsibility to private property owners that took effect in January and its return to the Public Works Department in April.
This recommendation was made because some who bought their homes in Lubbock at that time did not have all the information and did so with the understanding that the city would be taking care of sewer repairs in the public right-of-way.
Longtime Lubbock residents came to the committee during the meetings with concerns over transparency in this issue.
A significant point of confusion was over individual costs after a media report gave the story of one resident dealing with estimated costs as high as $15,000.
Public Works Director Wood Franklin told the city council that early in the process, a capital project found around 1,000 repair cases in 2023 averaging $1,000 in costs per case. But plumbers on the committee said that couldn’t account for the total cost. Franklin said the discrepancy is because the city doesn’t keep books in the same way that private plumbers do.
“It didn't account for any equipment, depreciation, it didn't account for overhead, the dispatchers that send those crews,” Franklin said, adding that counting the cost is not as simple for the city because the public works crews are supposed to work on more than just sewer lateral line repairs.
“We want them to work on fire hydrants, we want them to work on replacing and installing water and sewer mains throughout the city, so the cost of those are a little different,” Franklin said. “We just don't do our math that way or our bookkeeping that way because we're not running a business for profit here at the city of Lubbock.”
After hearing from plumbers on the committee, the average cost was placed between $3,500 and $4,500. Along with the shared responsibility of their recommendation, the committee also recommended the city develop a program for low and fixed-income citizens who would have trouble meeting the added costs above the proposed $2,500 subsidy.
Even the plumbers were not without misunderstanding, as some felt the city’s inclusion of plumbers on the committee and the limitation of work to “city-approved” contract plumbers allowed for a bias in the process. However, according to the Public Works Department, the only qualification for a plumber to be eligible to contract for city work is that they are licensed with the state of Texas.
In the committee meetings, one reason given for leaving work to those contractors was to ensure that homeowners still had a choice of plumber to work on their pipe and for what price.
The underlying issue
When responsibility for costs and maintenance for sewer lateral lines that needed repair in the public right-of-way was first shifted from private property owners to the city of Lubbock Public Works Department in 2006, the city’s population was just over 216,000.
Since then, almost 50,000 people have joined the city, and that’s only expected to keep growing.
Just before the city council heard the sewer line committee’s recommendations, a public hearing was underway to take comments on the possible annexation of more than 370 acres in southwest Lubbock at 146th Street and Slide Road.
Citizens in Highland Oaks relied on their own private wells for water until the water supply for their area began to thin. Now that the city limits have spread enough to meet with the neighborhood, residents have the choice of meeting their water needs by hooking up with the City of Lubbock’s pipes.
The second hearing will take place on July 23 before citizens of the Highland Oaks neighborhood vote on whether to join the City of Lubbock in November. This would add more homeowners who may be eligible for the subsidy and more pipe maintenance for the Public Works Department.
According to the Public Works Department, the city currently maintains more than 2,100 miles of water mains, 1,320 miles of sewer mains, and 7,743 fire hydrants.
Franklin told the city council as much as 50% of the Public Works crews’ time has been spent on sewer lateral line repairs, leaving other repair projects and public safety concerns like maintenance on the fire hydrant systems to fall through the cracks.
“We've had a lot of deferred maintenance on our fire hydrants, we’ve had a lot of fire hydrants that were out of service, and we have a lot of valves that were out of service,” Franklin said. “Which results into whenever we have water main breaks, we've got to go back and work these valves, and those valves are broken, and we've got to go back and work more valves. And that's just deferred time on getting that waterline repaired.”
While the Public Works Department played a role in guiding the residents and plumbers on the committee, these recent issues have raised the broader question of whether departments like Public Works have the resources needed to account for Lubbock’s fast growth.
General funds for the Public Works Department were steadily increasing in previous budgets, from more than $25 million in Fiscal Year 2019-2020 to more than $38 million in FY2022-2023, until last year’s budget, when the fund was reduced by almost $564,000.
In response to the recommendations, members of the city council expressed concern over the additional costs that this subsidy could add to the city.
District 3 representative David Glasheen said he's concerned that the addition of a subsidy could raise the already high costs associated with these repairs as part of a “government-imposed market floor,” and that the council needs to consider this moving forward, especially in the upcoming budget discussions.
“The committee's recommendation would impose a significant cost on the city– in terms of millions of dollars, in addition to the manpower and the equipment that would be needed,” Glasheen said. “So the budget is going to be a significant obstacle to finding the right balance in the lateral line decision.”
District 5 representative Dr. Jennifer Wilson said she’s trying to make the math work so that costs are not added to taxpayers. She is conflicted about the next step but added that she will be looking at how other cities approach this issue.
“I think this is probably one of the most complex issues we have ever put before an ad hoc citizens committee. And I don't think there's an easy solution to this. I want to make sure that it is financially fundable, how we do it. We also don't want to put financial hardship on anybody,” Wilson said. “There's a lot of questions, I think, still left to be answered. But they have started to lay the groundwork for something very important that we're going to have to finish up.”
While Wilson said for now, she believes the Public Works Department has the resources they need, she added that city departments have to see bigger pools of resources to take care of the city as responsibilities grow with the population.
“I think that's going to have to continue as Lubbock grows, is we're going to have to continue to fund Public Works so they can grow that department,” Wilson said. “They can't just stay stagnant at numbers and money, because they're never going to be able to keep up.”
Wilson said the committee’s recommendations will go back to city staff to see how this could work without adding a “larger burden on taxpayers" from the city side.
While chairman Jeff Reese and the rest of the committee accounted for the contention about where the cost would ultimately fall, one consistent point across all stakeholders has been that changes are necessary.
“This committee's recommendation absolutely cannot be status quo, because that's not working,” Reese said. “We're missing very significant fire hydrant maintenance and other things that matter, life and safety things that matter. And so we can't just stay on the status quo.”
The city council will still have to make a final decision on whether to implement part, all, or none of the citizen committee’s recommendations before taking further action. Until then, the original ordinance leaves the city's public works department fully responsible for repairing sewer lateral lines in the public right-of-way.