Crosby Awarded Funding to Replace Water and Sewer Mains

The Minnesota Public Facilities Authority recently awarded over $44 million for wastewater and drinking water infrastructure to 15 cities across the state. For Crosby, which is receiving $3.5 million to help rebuild outdated water and sewer lines, construction is already underway.

“We’re in the middle of a $13 million project that includes sanitary sewer, water, and storm sewer,” said Crosby Mayor Diane Cash. “We designed this project around the oldest infrastructure that we have, and we’re finding a lot of leakage, that water is going into the ground or sewers, getting rainwater, so those deficiencies will be fixed.”

The current water lines are leaking, allowing treated water along with sewage to seep into the ground. Cash says that this can turn into an additional cost for taxpayers.

“We have wells and our own water treatment plant. And when we treat water and it goes into the ground and not into somebody’s house, that’s money we’ve spent treating water that didn’t get to a house,” she added. “If there’s cracks in the old clay pipe, you get rainwater into your sanitary sewer, and our fees are based on the fluids of the sewer.”

Plans for the project started in 2019 when Cash joined the city council, with the original focus being on road repairs. But according to her, municipalities can obtain additional funding for road repair if they have water and sewage lines beneath them.

“We picked roads that had aging infrastructure underneath because then you can get funding at 2% on a bond,” she explained. “If you have a street with no sewer and water underneath, you have to finance that yourself, and that’s very expensive for the taxpayers. We have a backlog of about 20 million in street repairs, and if you take that and split it among 2,250 people, that’s pretty expensive.”

Construction is already underway in Crosby on the city’s three-phase project. Phases one and two are made up mostly of alleyways and residential streets. But Cash says that the third phase may be the most important.

“It’s the roads people drive on,” she emphasized. “It’s 1st Street South and 2nd Street South with aging infrastructure underneath, and the roads are unplowable because the tar is all broken up. The roads are just shot—they’re past their life.”

Crosby is currently seeking bids to execute the third phase of their water main and roadwork project.