Freeport Needs a Water and Sewer Commission

Freeport's water and sewer system is a public utility.  The funding and expenses must be kept separate from the City of Freeport's other financial books.  The users of this most important public utility deserve to know how it is being run and who it is that is making long term, publicly expensive decisions.

Prior to 2017 and City Manager Lowell Crow, Freeport utilized a  Water and Sewer Commission which would handle all things regarding our public utility.  The Board of Water and Sewer Commissioners consisted of five people, the members of the commission usually had plumbing, construction or engineering experience.  Here is a picture from City ordinances as the paragraph appeared in the 1980s.

In the writer's opinion this system worked very well and provided much more in the way of transparency for us, the owners of the public utility as well as the Freeport City Council.  As it stands now all decisions have already been made somewhere behind closed doors prior to arriving on the City Council agenda.

At present, there is a plan for the largest buildout of water and sewer in the history of Freeport, in to the Forrestville Valley School district south of the Titan Tire plant.  A plan that would not be any where near economically feasible had Covid relief money not dropped from the sky.  How feasible it will be for present users of the water and sewer system to maintain such a buildout without numerous new users, no one knows for sure.  There has been no independent feasibility study of any type conducted.

So where did Freeport water and sewer rate payers (and by extension the Freeport City Council) first learn that this massive buildout was being proposed? The July 12, 2021 meeting of the Planning and Development Committee of the Stephenson County Board, that is where it was first made public.

Meeting minutes from this meeting make it clear that this proposal, and the plan to spend Stephenson County's American Recovery Plan Act dollars on the project, originated behind closed doors within the Greater Freeport Partnership.

One question to the Stephenson County Board.  Why ask the citizens of Freeport to subsidize another school district with our public utility?  Forrestville Valley will reap industrial property without the added cost of new students.  And the school board in Forreston can close their one school in Stephenson County, at German Valley, without so much as a telephone call to the Chairman of the Stephenson County Board.

Why can't this money be used to help construct a treatment plant on site?  Titan already treats their own.  Why is there only one solution on the table?

There are many more issues beyond this one confronting rate payers of Freeport's (not Stephenson County's) water and sewer system and the Freeport City Council.  We need and deserve much greater transparency when it come to our only but most important public utility in Freeport. 

I urge the incoming Freeport City Council to bring back the Water and Sewer Commission,  appoint competent and qualified commissioners and begin to examine the functionality of our public utility from top to bottom.  

As always, yours in honesty,

John Samuel Cook

2023