Public good comes at private expense

Homeowners pay to fill sewer gaps, city slow to fix problems

By Lee van der Voo

The Portland Tribune, Oct 5, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (23 Reader comments)

JIM CLARK / TRIBUNE PHOTOS

Retired philosophy professor Graham Conroy, helped by daughter Gillian Conroy (right), has been trying to come up with a plan to save his 1900 home in Northwest Portland without having to spend tens of thousands of dollars if his neighbor cuts him off a shared sewer line as scheduled at the end of October.

Graham Conroy is 82 years old, and this past year hasn’t been a very good one.

Last December, he had a stroke. Then in April, he got a letter from the city of Portland telling him he would lose his sewer service in 30 days.

After months of negotiation with a neighbor went badly, Conroy – sleepless and in deteriorating health – arrived at a simple but terrible choice: He could either lose his Northwest Portland home or lose his life savings to fix the problem.

Now, three weeks before Conroy was set to lose sewer service, intervention from two city commissioners – Randy Leonard and Sam Adams – appears to have resolved the problem. If the fix works, the emergency plan could be approved to help other homeowners like Conroy with their sewer problems.

But until now – and in a more aggressive way during the past three years – the city has been forcing homeowners who have party-line sewers, or sewers that are linked to a neighbor’s line rather than to a sewer main, to abandon the lines when they need repair.

They are telling people like Conroy to link their homes directly to a sewer main. But an estimated 4,000 people citywide have no adjacent sewer main to link to.

Citizens in Portland have been spending thousands of dollars on solutions, in some cases financing on their own what are in essence public sewer projects. They face sums that cause sometimes impossible burdens. Meanwhile, a city plan to fix its sewer system’s gaps is years away.

Widespread malfunction of the party-line sewers, which are generally about 100 years old, have made the problems more common in recent years.

Homeowners with malfunctioning party lines can face fines of up to $1,000 a day. They also face the need for negotiations with neighbors, who often want money to allow someone else’s pipe to cross their land to a city sewer main.

Officials at Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services, which oversees sewers, and the Bureau of Development Services, which handles permits for repairs, say they’re simply enforcing state laws that require the dismantling of party-line sewers.

Gillian Conroy, Graham Conroy’s daughter, puts it another way.

“Right now the city is building up its infrastructure on the backs of its citizens,” she said. “They’re putting hundreds of citizens in a position to lose everything. And what they’re counting on now is everybody thinks they’re the only one.”

He’s not the only one

Conroy’s problem, in many ways, is typical: He has a party-line sewer. A backup into a neighbor’s home first alerted Conroy and the neighbor to the shared connection. As state plumbing code requires when repairs are due, Conroy has to either get his own connection to a city sewer main or sign a legal agreement with his neighbor that the party line can stay.

But when the neighbors couldn’t agree on a fair price for maintenance of the line, Conroy found himself among a growing number of people who have no access to sewer mains because of lapses in the city’s infrastructure. City officials suggested that he spend an estimated $100,000 to extend a public sewer main down Northwest 24th Avenue to his home. Without a fix, Conroy faced possible condemnation of his home if sewage spilled.

Neighbor Chris Wilkerson, with whom Conroy negotiated unsuccessfully, said he didn’t think the pair should share the same sewer line because they couldn’t agree on splitting the costs.

As an alternative, the two tried to negotiate an easement that would have allowed Conroy to run a pipe through Wilkerson’s land to a sewer main on Northwest Northrup Street. But the two neighbors couldn’t agree on a price for the easement.

Wilkerson, meanwhile, was engaged in his own struggles with the city. As sewage from the leaking party line was filling his basement and bubbling up into his shower, Wilkerson said he could not obtain a permit for repairs because the party line was in place. Frantic for a solution and months into sewage leaks, Wilkerson applied for a permit to cut Conroy off the party line. The city gave Conroy until Oct. 29 before his sewer service would end.

“My understanding was I was going to have to cap Mr. Conroy off the sewer in order to get the permit (for repairs),” Wilkerson said. “I’m sympathetic to his situation, but I also understand why the city doesn’t want party sewers.

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