Robert L. Timm, Minot

Do it, don’t do it, do it! The city of Minot needs to stick to the “Don’t Do It” policy of allowing homeowners to hooking their sump pumps into the city sanitary sewer system. Instead of fining homeowners for hooking their sump pumps into the city sanitation system, as they should, they recently encouraged people to connect their sump pumps in to the system.

As the old saying goes “You can’t get the toothpaste back into the tube” and next spring when the big melt begins the city of Minot is not going to get all the homeowners who followed the cities advice to hook up to un-hook. As one of a hundred or so homeowners who have had to deal with years of persistent sewage backups in our homes this last bit of advice from the city encouraging homeowners to connect their sump pumps to the sanitary sewer system is more than a bit disturbing.

Last spring, like most over the past two decades, affected homeowners once again put up with several sewage back-ups into their basements. The city promised that they were going to fix it, just as they have promised for several years now. Once the snow melted we were told that they (the city) were going to wait until fall so they wouldn’t disturb the zoo season as the repairs needed are on zoo property. Fall came, now winter is here, and no repairs have been made.

The Minot area has not only set new records for moisture this year, we shattered records this year. When spring comes we can expect thousands of sump pumps running at a pace never seen before attempting to keep up with all the new moisture on top of the already saturated ground. Will the sanitary sewer system that the City has admittedly acknowledged as antiquated and damaged keep up with demands? Not a chance.

So here we in the valley sit, waiting to see not if we will have back-ups in the spring of 2014 but how many and how bad. This aggravation on top of the city assessor raising our home values by 50 percent or more. Common sense says that if a home owner discloses the sewage problem when selling the house he/she would be lucky to get half the appraised value. Even the councilmen for our area, Frey and Lehner, failed to come to our aid in either fixing the sanitary sewer problem or aiding us in debating the increase in property values of homes that would be near impossible to sell if full disclosure is exercised.

The city needs to revoke its suggestion to hook sump pumps into the sanitary sewer system and voters need to revoke councilmen who do not represent them.