GREENUP — Like a timid kid dipping his toes in the lake to test the water, the Greenup City Council has dipped in and out of a proposed plan to align with the county and the city of Wurtland in a regional sewer system.

City attorney Stephen McGinnis discussed the proposal with the council at a special meeting on Tuesday. All council members were present except Amy Ferguson.

McGinnis told the councilmen some things were certain:

‰Wurtland will keep its sewer plant; it will not be a multi-entity owed facility like Greenup County Environmental Commission.

‰A sewer district formed by county, with representatives from the county and cities involved, will own the lines through which sewage will be pumped from Greenup to Wurtland.

‰The city will pay for the cost of electricity at the pump station, the cost of sewage treatment at the Wurtland plant and a fee to the sewer district that will be placed in a maintenance fund. The county and Wurtland will also contribute to the fund.

‰A fair and equitable plan to set rates in the future has been built into the proposal which would be approved by ordinance by the city council. The Wurtland City Council and the Greenup County Fiscal Court will sign similar ordinances.

Greenup Mayor Lundie Meadows announced that he was taking off his mayor’s hat and offering his personal opinion:

“There’s never going to be a line to Lloyd,” he said. “I’d like to see an addition to the contract that says if lines to Lloyd aren’t completed or under way within five years, the system reverts to Greenup even if the city has to pay.”

Doug Collins, representing Greenup County Judge-Executive Bobby Carpenter at the meeting, said after the meeting adjourned that the plan has always been to serve Lloyd with sewer lines and that Greenup was asked after the decision has made.

“The original plan was to take the money we had and go to Lloyd. The idea came from concerns from residents in the Lloyd area about non-perking there and sewage laying on lawns.”

Collins said that when sewers are extended to Lloyd, the package plant that serves the high school will be eliminated and the school hooked to the sewer line.

“The bottom line is that if Greenup declines to join us, we go on in conjunction with Wurtland and the project moves forward as we obtain funds.”

Complicating things for Greenup, according to Meadows, is that the city is facing a crisis with its sewer plant.

“Speaking with the Kentucky Department of Water, it’s obvious that it’s not a matter of when we do it (join the regional sewer plan) but when.”

He said that if the city doesn’t become part of the proposed system, he expects a letter to arrive from the state advising the city to reconsider and that if it does not, no permit will be issued for the city to operate its sewer plant as it stands. He said the state would send a list of improvements that had to be made to bring the plant to current standards.

“What’s happened is we’ve let things slide and we’ve let things slide there at the sewer plant and we’ve reached the end,” he said. “By failing to pay it forward all these years, we’ve come to this point.”

Meadows told the council that the city has a grant to run a line from the water sludge plant to the sewer plant to press out the sludge, which is costing the city about $17,000 every six months.

The council delayed action until McGinnis receives answers on some questions.