Bourbon Fire Protection District firefighter Billy DeLoach raised concerns on Aug. 18 about increasing the water and sewer rates. The concerns stemmed from a previous Aug. 11 Bourbon Board of Aldermen special meeting discussion.

During the Aug. 11 meeting, City Clerk Stacy Blake announced that an addendum will be made to the bid from Bartlett & West for the Interstate 44 sewer project, pushing the cost over $1.8 million. This project will also include sewer work on both Jost and Siebenman streets.

Before the Aug. 18 meeting, Blake said that they had a meeting with Bartlett & West and that the cost of the project was coming in at $1.7 million. A motion to amend the task order for the Interstate 44, Jost Street and Siebenman Street sewer repair and improvement project was approved with a 4-0 vote.

The city has an $850,000 grant to cover construction costs, and the rest will be covered by a low-interest loan. Blake added that the city may do a water rate study, which might lead to an increase in the sewer rate.

“At the current sewer rate, we are not…covering the cost of what it costs to operate the sewer,” Blake said.

Bourbon has also gone many years without consistently increasing the water or sewer rate, and Blake believes that the city should possibly consider doubling the sewer rate.

“It has to be fixed. There’s no question about whether or not it has to be fixed,” Blake said.

During the Aug. 18 meeting, DeLoach was concerned about doubling rates.

“We are not paying more for the negligence of not only this administration, but administrations in the past,” DeLoach said.

He also addressed, another topic from the Aug. 11 meeting, the possibility of natural gas coming into Bourbon

“If we’ve got so many issues with the water system and the sewer system and X, Y and Z, why not focus all of your attention on, like you said, one problem instead of worrying about bringing infrastructure into Bourbon, the natural gas?” DeLoach asked. “Why are we worried about other things? Things that we have no control over. We do have control over the water system.”

Huddleston explained that economic development can help reduce operational expenses for businesses and residents, allowing property owners to reinvest their money into whatever they please.

“Economic development in general is what’s going to solve these perpetual budgetary problems,” Huddleston said. “And so you end up getting an economy that builds upon itself, where we can spend more on maintenance, invest more on maintenance and that reduces our long-term costs, which means that we have more money for more investment.”

Brine sees it as a possible long-term path they can follow, but are not focused on it at the moment.

“Natural gas is not coming before water and sewer, but I do think that if we want to make progress, we have to have another path,” Brine said.

Ware asked the board for more transparency so that citizens can see where the board is spending the city’s money.

“The city could do to be proactive on announcing, ‘Hey, the public works is going to be doing this, this month or this next month,’ to show that you are being good stewards with the money and that you are correcting the infrastructure and trying to make things better,” Ware said. “Until you guys started up a Facebook page, nobody knew anything.”

In other business, Bill No. 826.1 became Ordinance 835, which allows the city of Bourbon to establish a procedure to disclose potential conflicts of interest and substantial interests for certain municipal officials. The measure was approved with a 4-0 vote.

Another motion to renew Bourbon’s basic-tier membership with the Meramec Regional Planning Commission was also made and was approved with a 4-0 vote.