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®CITY OF SOUTH BEND I OFFICE OF THE CLERK
<br /> us as well. Also, we have a number of interested parties in the community involved in the
<br /> environmental area and water quality in particular. For example, the St. Joseph River Basin
<br /> Commission, the Friends of St. Joseph River, Shirley Heinze Land Trust and the Bowman Creek
<br /> Educational System, Notre Dame, IUSB, IVY Tech, have all written letters of support, and we're
<br /> continuing to build that support. We are continuing to gather that support so that when we go to
<br /> the EPA the next time in the coming weeks, we'll be able to say it's not just us, it's our Council,
<br /> our Mayor, and our interested parties as well. Those organizations are the people in the other
<br /> communities who are saying they don't like their communities' plans when they go to the EPA.
<br /> We've been an open book,and we've built good faith relationships with the community and they're
<br /> aware that we have their best interests at heart when it comes to affordability and the environment
<br /> as well. It's been easy because this plan that we've come up with is not a rollback. We haven't
<br /> said let's spend less money or do less work,we've been able to say we're able to spend less money,
<br /> and we're actually going to do less work but only because there is less infrastructure that will need
<br /> to be built, and it is that unnecessary infrastructure that is not being built. At the end of the day,
<br /> the metrics that we're going for that are in the CSO Policy is the amount of wet weather that you're
<br /> capturing and treating, and the percentage of time that you are complying with that water quality
<br /> criteria. In terms of the water quality criteria,we really are equal to the$200 million plan. Its equal
<br /> to the$700 million Long-Term Control Plan,and in regard to the wet water capture,we're actually
<br /> going to do better with the SAGE plan rather than the$700 million plan,by a number of percentage
<br /> points actually. We can never totally foresee what is going to happen, but when you're dealing
<br /> with a technical renegotiation like this,we've done the hard work and we have a good plan, we've
<br /> been able to draw from past investment, and this is not a lesser solution, so that makes our job a
<br /> little bit easier.
<br /> He went on, Some comments from recent correspondence with regulators that I thought were
<br /> interesting: "EPA and IDEM strongly encourage South Bend's efforts to develop a less expensive
<br /> Long-Term Control Plan," that's a key thing from a much bigger letter. They shouldn't be just
<br /> looking for us to spend money, if we can get to the same point in the road it shouldn't make a big
<br /> difference to them. "South Bend has pursued an innovative approach by installing over one-
<br /> hundred (100) smart sensors in its sewer system." They recognize that we're innovative and they
<br /> are encouraging us to go down that route farther.They won't make it easy for us,it will be difficult
<br /> negotiations, but we're hoping we have everybody on board that we need and we'll hopefully be
<br /> successful.
<br /> Mr. Horvath stated, This is a multi-year effort to get to the point where we have the right plan to
<br /> take to the DOJ and it wasn't staff just coming up with this. We also hired some really brilliant
<br /> people to work on it,but there was also the citizen's advisory crew which had a really broad section
<br /> of our community involved. We had Council Members on there, business owners,
<br /> environmentalists, financial people, attorneys, and all sorts of people representing different
<br /> interests, so we could push each other and get to a good plan. That's one(1) of the reasons we've
<br /> been able to get a lot of letters of support, even from environmental groups. Sometimes,that's one
<br /> of the things the EPA really worries about. They are worried about these third(3'd)party lawsuits
<br /> that could come from the Sierra Club or somewhere else because you're degrading the
<br /> environment. We also feel pretty confident that although we've been able to get the costs down,
<br /> our percent capture is also going up. The guidance documents say they want to get you to where
<br /> you are capturing eighty-five percent(85%) of your wet weather flow, and we're going to be over
<br /> ninety-eight percent(98%), so we're blowing that out of the water. There are programs where they
<br /> have put agreements in place that are far less than that threshold, so we feel strongly that we have
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