Skip to main contentWhen Bryan Smith bought his 70-year-old bungalow in Southeast Portland in 2003, he was drawn to the huge flowering tree in the front yard.
He paid little attention to the
septic tank a stone's throw from the tree on the home's 8,000-square-foot lot. And he says no one told him he'd need to disconnect it.
Now that septic tank is costing
Smith his home, he says—and shining a light on a city of Portland policy that allows fees on homeowners to grow significantly if they don't connect to the public sewer when the city tells them to.
A year after Smith, a bartender,
bought the Brentwood-Darlington house for about $140,000, the city of Portland
sent him a notice that it had extended a city sewer line to his street in 1994 and that he had until 2007 to connect to it. Although Smith's septic tank worked
fine, ones that fail can contaminate groundwater. About 2,000 homes in Portland still lack sewer service, says Linc Mann, a spokesman for the city's sewer bureau.
In 2004, the city would have charged Smith $9,823 in fees to connect.
Smith, now 46, says he doesn't remember getting a
notice until 2008, the year he opened a pub on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard then called
Vertigo. "If I had been financially stable," he says, "I would have done it
right then."
But he was pouring money into his bar. The city's financing options for low-income residents didn't make the cost of hooking up affordable, he says. In 2008, the city would have charged him $10,521. That didn't include the price of hiring a contractor to decommission the septic tank and to connect the house to the city line, an additional expense of about $5,000.
"Business wasn't that great," he says. "Hooking up to the sewer was the last thing on my mind."
A year ago, Smith sold his pub. He was losing too much money. He and his girlfriend, Rachel Fishman, decided they needed to get their finances in order, including taking care of some deferred maintenance in their Malden Street home, whose value had increased substantially. Turns out, so had the fees.
They decided to seek a home equity
loan and pay for the sewer repairs. By now, though, the city's fee for connecting to
the sewer has gone up to $24,721, not including the cost of decommissioning the tank and building the connection from their house to the street.
They couldn't get the loan they wanted to do the work, though, because they weren't connected to the sewer, Smith and Fishman say. The city would loan them the money, but interest costs put that out of reach, they say.
"We're going to have to walk away," Fishman, a sales operation manager for a large corporation, told Smith after picking him up from work recently.
City officials justify the price increase by noting that city ratepayers have been subsidizing the bonds that paid for the Malden Street project since 1992.
Mann, the spokesman for the Bureau of Environmental Services, says the couple should have connected a decade ago. "The fact is this has been put off for 10 years," he said. "They would have been much better off if they had done it 10 years ago."
Smith doesn't deny that. "I agree with them," he says. "Obviously it would have been better. I still couldn't have afforded it."
The couple put the house on the market on Aug. 16. So far buyers have been put off by the looming $30,000 expense.
Even if they do sell, the couple is in a pinch.
They'll be leaving behind a $1,100 monthly mortgage to pay rent that likely will hover above $2,000 per month. The couple has two young kids, and they'd like them to be able to stay in the same schools. That means their choices are limited.
"The reality is we won't be
able to buy this kind of house with our income again,â Fishman says.
She adds: "It's reasonable for there to be some sort of penalty, but that penalty shouldn't be on the order of 300 percent."
WWeek 2015