The La Crosse City Council held a planning meeting on Tuesday, March 10, 2026, from 6:09 p.m. until 8:08 p.m. in the Council Chambers. The meeting featured detailed presentations from the Utilities Department covering the water, sanitary sewer, and stormwater utilities, focusing on infrastructure challenges, regulatory compliance, and financial outlooks. The meeting was adjourned early due to loss of quorum.
Hello, I'm gonna call this council planning meeting to order. It is 6.09 p.m. Um, we have Erin Goggin excused and uh Chris Kalo. Uh two people are online currently. Uh McKinsey Mandel, excuse me, three people online, McKinsey Mandel, Roseanne Northwood, and um council member Janssen. I anticipate Crystal might be here yet, but we can get started with nine folks. Thank you so much. I do hear a door now. So at this time, if um Tina Erickson could come forward and begin with her presentation. For those of you online, you are able to observe this with your own computers, but it will be a shared experience through the Zoom, and it is being recorded. Thank you. Sorry, I always forget. Okay, so I gotta minimize this, and sorry, I gotta get oh there goes on to hide this. Just takes a little delay in responding. Good evening. Uh my name is Tina Erickson. I'm the utilities finance and compliance manager. Uh I am starting this evening's presentations uh because mine will kind of overlap all three utilities water, sewer, and stormwater, as well as uh functions that happen within the utilities office that support those three areas. Uh, and then uh Jared Greeno will be here presenting for sewer and stormwater, and uh Derek Green will be presenting on the water utility. So, first, I'm just this is a little bit of history of the water sewer and stormwater utility. So, prior to 1997, there was only a water utility. We uh all sewer and stormwater functions were paid through property taxes uh here in our community. Then in 1997, the sewer sewer utility was created, and the cost to operate was removed from the property tax roll. So now all users paid for the service, including your tax exempt entities. Uh, one thing I will like to kind of add in that spot is it was very interesting. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but when I first started working here, I saw the change in consumption from water uh when sewers started getting charged because people used to be able to just irrigate their lawns however the only they wanted and didn't pay anything for it beyond just the water cost. So uh consumption dropped significantly once the sewer utilities was created, and they were paying for both the water and the sewer charges. Uh in 2012, the stormwater utility was created. Uh in that initial phase, all capital expenditures were shared 50-50 with the city. Uh then in 2022, the utility began funding 100% of the capital projects. So the next three slides, uh again, I'm not gonna go into every detail on these. I hope that people have taken time to look through them. You can look through them at a later time. Um, but I just will call out a few interesting facts that I like to see. So all of these slides kind of represent the assets that the utility currently has in our systems. Um, this is probably not all inclusive. There's maybe other things that we of course oversee inventory and such, but uh here are the things I'm gonna call out are, for example, the mains. So in for water, we have 222 miles of water main, effective uh year end 2024. All of this data is from 2024 because I haven't finalized 2025. Um we have sizes ranging from two inch to 24 inch, um, with our oldest main currently installed being installed in 1890. Uh and it as of year in 2024, our average uh estimated asset value was just over 61 million dollars. The sewer utility currently has 198 miles of sewer main, and the sizes range from eight inch to a 52 inch by 78 inch elliptical pipe. The oldest main here was installed in 1882. Uh, and the average uh asset value as of year in 2024 was about 126,200. And then stormwater, uh, we can only have 153 miles of storm main, uh sizes from 8 inch to a 10 by 12 box pipe, the oldest main installed in 1936, and the asset value year in 2024 was just over 27 million. So the next few slides are going to be related to some of the utilities' strategic challenges. And this relates to all three utilities. So of course, one of those is aging andor inadequate infrastructure. So what this means is of course we already have pipes in the ground. We have some that are that are over 100 years old.