Presenter
Presented by Mr. Ravenstahl
Title
Communication from City Controller Tony Pokora submitting an Audit of the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority and the outside municipal use of the City sewer system.
Attachment
PITTSBURGH WATER
And
SEWER AUTHORITY
Outside Municipal Use of the City
Sewer System
Report by the
Office of City Controller
ANTHONY J. POKOKA
ACTING CITY CONTROLLER
Anabell Kinney, Esq., Management Auditor
Gloria Novak, MED, Assistant Management Auditor
Trudy Hoover, MIR, Performance Auditor
Bette Ann Puharic, BS, Performance Auditor
March 2006
INTRODUCTION
This performance audit revisits the issue of outside municipal use of the City sewer system. Generally accepted governmental auditing standards were followed. In 1998, the Controller released a Performance Audit of Various Agreements with Surrounding Municipalities for Shared Sewer Maintenance and Repair. The audit surveyed existing cost sharing agreements and found that neither the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority nor Department of Public Works had systems to identify maintenance and repair work that was subject to reimbursement. (Public Works no longer has sewer maintenance responsibilities.) The audit recommended that the City and Authority investigate the legality and feasibility of rental or user fees for use of the City sewer system.
OVERVIEW
Pittsburgh Sewage System
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Pittsburgh had the highest typhoid fever mortality rate in the nation. A major cause of the typhoid was the disposal of raw sewage and industrial waste into the rivers from which the city obtained its drinking water. The expansion of the City sewer system exacerbated this problem by dumping more raw sewage into the rivers. Dumping of raw sewage into the rivers by upstream communities also contributed to this cesspool of disease.
In 1907, the City's first water treatmen...
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