Lakewood Informer

Resident generated news about Lakewood, Colorado

Lakewood Informer

Resident generated news about Lakewood, Colorado

Money Down The Drain

From Somebody Should Do Something

You may have noticed the 50% increase in the storm water fee being accessed this year. Such drastic increases usually indicate mismanagement and the failure to perform routine maintenance of a system in the years and decades prior. A properly financed maintenance program that is well run with periodic, but reasonable, rate increases does not need drastic assessments. Then again, this is Lakewood, Colorado. A city in a state that… Well, just look around.

Drainage ditch and pipe (poorly maintained, if at all) down the hill from the intersection of Jewell and Wright, behind the Dunstan Middle School.
 

Drainage ditch along the bike path, which runs parallel to Alameda. Yes, there is a concrete drainage pipe in there, somewhere. So, while you get lectured about maintaining your property for fire and flood mitigation, this is how the city, while collecting millions, maintains their drainage infrastructure.
 

You live on the hill, right? Water should like, I don’t know, flow down and drain away and stuff, right? Except, there is a number of spots in Ward 4, where the city-maintained streets and sidewalks don’t properly channel the water out of the neighborhood. In some spots, due to lacking drainage, it’s not uncommon to get a deluge of water and debris hauling down the streets. I suppose one could launch some model boats to see if they make it, so there is that.

I guess a part of me that’s like a squirrel that gets zapped on an electric fence, but keeps climbing on it thinking there is a stash of peanuts on the other side, so I started asking about how is storm water fund allocated amongst the city wards a little while ago. Here is the language of the CORA request I sent to the City in April of 2023:

“Accounting of dollars spent on storm water improvements in Ward 4 for the period from 2018-2023. This can be a table of projects with dollars or, if there is one, a website location showing the expenditures.”

To which the City promptly replied with:

On Mon, Aug 14, 2023, 16:23 Shared-PublicRecordsRequests <PublicRecordsRequests@lakewood.org> wrote:

At the City of Lakewood, we track organizational revenues and expenses at the organization level and do not break it up by Ward. With that being said, we do not have the information that was requested as that is now how the information is stored.

Kewl, kewl. Onward:

“Then where would one find the organizational level information for Lakewood utilities?”

On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 11:19 AM Shared-PublicRecordsRequests <PublicRecordsRequests@lakewood.org> wrote:

Per our finance team they recommend you use the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR) located at https://www.lakewood.org/Government/Departments/Finance in Financial Reports and to reference the Stormwater Fund in the corresponding years requested. The 2023 actuals will not be included in this as those financials have not been audited and will not be audited until 2024.

English being my second language, perhaps there is something that I missed in the Financial Report as it pertains to the storm-water-related expenditures, so I kept asking stupid questions, this time directing them at UtilityBilling@lakewood.org:

“We live in Ward 4, near the Green Mountain. There are no storm drains or other, visible, infrastructure components that might be stormwater related. Could you provide an explanation of what we are paying the Stormwater charge for in this part of the neighborhood. As in – what is that fee actually spent on to benefit our neighborhood?

It is not immediately obvious from the budget document, nor does the website seem to provide a neighborhood-specific breakdown.”

A very helpful customer service representative did provide a wall of text which was “taken from our lakewood.org/flow page and also from the FAQs”, with some of the highlights being:

Read the rest at Somebody Should Do Something

Scroll to top