A two-sentence notice in the spring of 1911 opened a fight the city is still paying for — to the tune of roughly $590 million. On Monday, May 8, 1911, the Lexington Leader ran a small notice on page nine, tucked between an item about a new sanitary-sewer line and a comic inventory by the racetrack poet Mickey Shannon. It was four lines long, and it read like housekeeping: NO MORE STORM WATER PERMITS.The Board of Public Works will hereafter refuse to issue any more permits to tap storm water sewers. This is in compliance with a recently enacted ordinance. The notice that started it: Lexington Leader, May 8, 1911. (Public domain) A reader in 1911 would have skimmed past it. A reader in 2026 should stop. Because that little notice — the city government formally refusing to let anyone else connect a sewage pipe to a storm-water drain — is the opening shot in a fight Lexington is still fighting, under a federal judge’s supervision, on a clock that runs until December 31, 2030. The thing the Board of Public Works was trying to stop in 1911 has a modern name now. It’s called an illicit cross-connection, and it is item one in the Clean Water Act consent decree that has cost this city roughly $590 million and counting. Lexington has been telling people to stop tapping the storm sewers for a hundred and fifteen years. Two pipes, one shortcut To understand the notice, you have to understand how Lexington built its sewers — which is to say, separately, and on purpose. Around 1895 the city adopted the era’s most modern design, hiring Hering Fuller of New York — Rudolph Hering was the country’s foremost champion of the separate-sewer system — to lay out two distinct networks: storm-water sewers to carry rain off the streets to the creeks, and sanitary sewers to carry waste to treatment. Unlike older cities that ran a single combined pipe for both, Lexington kept rain and sewage apart. On paper it was the hygienic, forward-looking choice. The catch was money and time: the sanitary network was expensive and slow to build, and as late as 1915 only about 65 to 70 percent of the city was actually connected to it. In 1911 the sanitary lines hadn’t reached every street yet — but the storm-water sewers largely had. So people took the shortcut. If your street had a storm drain but no sanitary line, and the city was simultaneously ordering you to fill in your old backyard vault and cesspool, the storm sewer was right there. You tapped it. The scale of it surfaced at a Joint Improvement Committee meeting reported in the Leader on February 28, 1911. Dr. N. R. Simmons, the city’s Health Officer, told the committee that in the course of serving notices on residents to connect to sewers, he had discovered there were no sanitary sewers on Ohio, Third, Deweese, Short, Upper, High, Patterson and Georgetown streets and in Hampton Court, but that a great many property owners had connected with storm water sewers. He said that the Board of Health did not regard this as hygienic and recommended that sanitary sewers be constructed on these streets. What happened next is the part that should sound familiar to anyone who has watched a modern infrastructure problem get kicked down the road. The committee did not stop the practice. It blessed it, as a stopgap: The committee decided that when it was deemed necessary by the Health Officer and Superintendent of the Board of Public Works, other residents should be permitted to connect with the storm water sewers, with the understanding that when sanitary sewers are constructed on their street they connect with them and disconnect with the storm water sewers. Connect to the storm sewer now; promise to switch to the sanitary sewer later. The “later,” predictably, was the part that didn’t reliably happen. Every one of those sanctioned hookups became a permanent place where sewage flowed into a pipe meant only for rain — and from there, untreated, into Lexington’s streams. Why it mattered: the city was filtering its water and still burying its dead This was not a question of bad smells alone. In 1911, sewage in the water meant typhoid fever, and typhoid was a mass killer. Kentucky held the second-highest typhoid death rate in the entire U.S. registration area for the years 1911 through 1916, and the state Board of Health had calculated that Kentucky suffered some 45,024 cases of typhoid and 3,366 deaths in a single two-year span — a toll it valued, coldly, at more than $7.6 million. The Board named the cause precisely: the germs “usually gain entrance to the system through infected water from wells or streams draining inhabited areas, and polluted by infected fecal matter.” Lexington knew the danger first-hand. When the Army packed some 20,000 Spanish-American War troops into Camp Hamilton outside town in 1898, typhoid tore through the camp with more than three hundred cases. Here is the part that turns a smell into an indictment. Lexington was not drinking dirty water for lack of trying. The city’s water company had installed a mechanical filtration plant by 1896 — early, for an American city its size. Lexington had clean water coming in and an “abnormally high death rate” anyway, as the Leader put it. Filtered water plus a high typhoid rate points away from the tap and straight at the watershed: at the sewage Lexington was pouring, raw, into the same creeks that drained the town. The storm-sewer taps were one tributary of that problem. Town Branch was the main stem. Town Branch, “a huge cess pool” By high summer the consequences were impossible to ignore, and the Leader put them on the front of its city section on Sunday, June 25, 1911, under a headline that did not hedge: MENACE TO HEALTH OF ENTIRE CITY AND SUBURBS. It was a full-column broadside — the most detailed thing anyone wrote about Lexington’s sewage crisis that decade — and it opened by predicting the city would face “a damage suit on its hands for menace to the public health of the community.” The paper’s central villain was Town Branch — the creek that runs through the middle of Lexington, by then already partly culverted beneath downtown. The Leader described a stream converted into a huge cess pool for the reception of sewage and night soil, and the worst feature of it all is that where the main trunk sewer and the filth from the hopper empties into this already heavily polluted stream, just below Tarr’s distillery, it is wide open and goes on its course, contaminating the atmosphere for miles below the city and becoming a menace to the health of both man and beast that live along its banks. There is a deep irony in that sentence, because Town Branch was Lexington’s first sewer — the city had been using it as one for a century. Lexington was platted in 1781 along the course of the creek, not by compass; the strip of ground set aside for it became Water Street. As the town grew over the stream, it walled and roofed the creek section by section — the first walling in 1850, more in 1880 and 1907 — until, as the city’s own consulting engineers would put it a few years later, “the Town Branch within the city has in the course of years been arched over, making it simply a main sewer.” The Market House sat directly on top of it downtown. People had been complaining about the result for just as long: an 1888 Leader series called Branch Alley “a stream of almost living filth,” and a resident recalled the creek as far back as 1871 as “the little sickly, nauseating, dried up stream, draining its filthy waters under our present market house.” The covered creek was convenient — buildings could simply drop their waste into it — and that convenience was exactly the problem the storm-sewer taps reproduced in miniature. That “hopper” was a real place, and the Leader sent a reporter to it: a night-soil dumping station at the intersection of Payne Street and the LN railroad, where the waste pumped out of the city’s privy vaults was tipped into the main sewer. It was “found in a most filthy condition, reeking with foul odors that could be detected a block away,” with night soil “allowed to accumulate in heaps about the place.” Residents as far off as Main and Payne, and along West Short, Cox, and Georgetown, said they could smell it on warm evenings. And the city’s solution to the vault problem was, the paper charged, manufacturing a fresh nuisance. The Health Officer had ordered residents all over town to clean out or fill in their vaults at once, in midsummer, and licensed “scavengers” were carting the waste through residential streets at night to the hopper — “compelling people in many instances to flee from their yards and front porches, and to pull down windows to escape contamination from offensive odors.” A former member of the Board of Aldermen asked the obvious question: if the vaults had to be emptied, why in July? Why “not done … in the Fall or Winter, or before the weather made such a course a menace to the public health”? The “Cesspool Trust” The exposé’s sharpest section was about money. Coupled with the orders to clean or fill vaults, the Leader wrote, were “the extortionate charges of the [vault] cleaners.” The racket worked like this: once the Health Officer notified a citizen to clean his vault, a member of the firm “whose work is approved by the Health Department” would appear, quote a price, and let the homeowner know he was the licensed cleaner — and the citizen, “fearing that he may be in contempt of the health authorities,” paid. “Hundreds of dollars,” the paper claimed, “have been extorted from the pockets of citizens in the last few weeks … by the exactions of the ‘Cesspool Trust,’ with the sanction of [the] Health Department.” This was not just muckraking; it was a live fight inside city hall, and the documents show both sides. The Thursday before the exposé, the bicameral General Council had introduced an ordinance to slash the vault-cleaner’s license from $15 to $2 — explicitly to break the Trust’s grip. The very next night, Friday, June 23, the City Board of Health met and pushed back: it recommended keeping the $15 license, partly because some cleaners had already paid it and because “the hopper cannot accommodate any more wagons.” The same Board of Health meeting voted to call in the cavalry — a motion “requesting the clerk of the board to write to Mr. Paul Hanson of Bowling Green, State Sanitary Inspector, to make a trip to this city for the purpose of making a survey of the sanitary sewerage system of Lexington.” The city’s own health officials, in other words, knew the system was broken; they just couldn’t agree with the Council on who was profiting from it. The City Board of Health calls in the state inspector — Lexington Herald, June 24, 1911. “Stretch our conscience” Dr. Simmons did not enjoy being the face of the scandal, and the next morning — Monday, June 26 — he got a front-page rebuttal: DR. N. R. SIMMONS REPLIES TO STORY IN THE LEADER. It is a remarkable document, because in defending himself the Health Officer accidentally explained exactly how a city talks itself into a problem it will spend a century undoing. On the storm-sewer taps specifically, he wrote: In regard to tapping storm water sewers, I want to say that I originally protested against it and a member of the General Council is on record as urging that we “stretch our conscience” and let the property owner tap the storm water sewers where sanitary sewers were not available. As Health Officer I reported the insanitary condition at Seventh and Upper, resulting from fetid matter being discharged by a storm water sewer which had been connected with a closet pipe somewhere. Health Officer N. R. Simmons answers back — front page, Lexington Leader, June 26, 1911. Stretch our conscience. A council member had said the quiet part out loud: we know it’s wrong to drain sewage into the storm sewers, but the sanitary lines aren’t built yet, so let people do it anyway. Simmons, to his credit, blamed the real culprit — money. He had personally campaigned for the fix: The Board indorsed the $100,000 sewer bond issue last fall for completing the sewerage system of the city, and so heartily was I in favor of it that I stood at the polls, in front of the residence of the editor of the LEADER, and worked all day urging the voters to approve the sewer bond issue. That bond — Ordinance No. 2556, put to voters in the fall of 1910 to borrow $100,000 to extend the sanitary system — is the other half of the 1911 story. Lexington wasn’t ignoring the problem; it was building, street by street, trying to give every illegal storm-sewer tap a legal sanitary line to switch to. The Woodland-to-Ashland main trunk that the Leader announced on the very same page as the tap ban was part of that build-out. The trouble was that the city could never quite build fast enough to close the gap, and every gap was a cross-connection. Ordinance No. 2556 — the $100,000 sewer-bond question put to Lexington voters. Lexington Herald, Sept. 27, 1910. A plague spot at Seventh and Upper The June 25 exposé had named the place where the abstraction turned into sick people. Under the subhead “An Instance Cited,” the Leader located a single storm-sewer tap and laid the consequences directly at its feet: Due to these very conditions complained of a serious menace to the public health exists at the corner of Seventh and Upper streets. Somebody in that vicinity has tapped a storm water sewer, which has emptied refuse out at that point, until the accumulations have become fetid and offensive under the hot summer weather. Several cases of typhoid fever are reported in that vicinity and it is believed that this plague spot has contributed to the unhealthy condition of the residents in that locality. Mayor John Skain had ordered the Board of Public Works to find out exactly who had tapped the sewer and where. And Seventh and Upper was not alone. The Leader listed a half-dozen more “contaminating points” where storm sewers, illegally connected by property owners and leaking through “some defect,” were pouring refuse into the street gutters — “a prolific source for the incubation and dissemination of disease germs”: the south side of Spring near Maxwell, Spring between High and Vine, the southeast corner of Third and Race, Third and Vertner, Fourth and Ohio. Read the list again. Those are not abstract sites. They sit in the same downtown core that, nearly a century later, a federal consent decree would carve into “sewersheds” and catalog leak by leak — Town Branch among the first of them. The long century in between For decades Lexington chipped at it — and, characteristically, only moved when someone made it. Because Town Branch carried the whole city’s sewage out of town untreated, the creek arrived in the next county downstream as an open sewer, and the neighbors sued: Woodford County indicted Lexington for the nuisance, and Franklin County threatened to. Lexington, the engineers noted, was “the only large city of the state which is not located upon a large stream” — it had no river to flush its sins into. So in November 1915 voters approved a $300,000 bond, four to one, and the Atlanta firm of Solomon-Norcross designed a treatment plant. It opened on the city farm west of town around 1919 — “one of the first sewage treatment plants in this section of the United States,” a works of Imhoff tanks, trickling filters, and sludge-drying beds. It was, in effect, the “disposal field … below the City Workhouse on the old Frankfort pike” that the 1911 exposé had demanded, finally built. Until then, Lexington’s sewage had simply gone into Town Branch and kept going. But the original sin never fully went away. The sanitary system grew to 81 pump stations and more than 1,400 miles of pipe, and sewage kept finding the storm sewers — through old sanctioned taps, through cracked pipes, through sump pumps and downspouts and the slow geological creep of groundwater into joints that should have been sealed. When it rained hard, the sanitary system overflowed into the creeks. On the calmest dry day, the cross-connections leaked all on their own. The reckoning, almost exactly 100 years later In November 2006, the United States — on behalf of the EPA, with the Commonwealth of Kentucky as a required co-plaintiff — sued the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government under the Clean Water Act. The two governments lodged a settlement in March 2008. A federal district judge rejected it; the Sixth Circuit reversed in January 2010; and the consent decree was finally entered on January 3, 2011 — almost exactly one hundred years after the Board of Public Works stopped issuing storm-water tap permits. Open the decree and the 1911 problem is right there in the legalese. The very first thing it stipulates about Lexington’s two sewer systems is that they are separate — except for the leaks: LFUCG’s Sanitary Sewer System is (except for certain illicit cross-connections) separate from the LFUCG’s storm water collection system. It identifies 111 recurring locations where sewage overflows and unpermitted discharges have been documented, “including illicit cross-connections.” Its definition of the “inflow” choking the system expressly includes “cross connections between storm sewers and sanitary sewers,” along with roof leaders, cellar drains, and yard drains — the 1911 catalog, almost verbatim. And in paragraph 15, it gave Lexington thirty days from the lodging of the decree to eliminate the cross-connections listed in its Appendix F. The decree even ordered the city to re-adopt ordinances giving it the power to compel “the elimination of any illicit connections” without first going before a judge — which is to say, to re-enact, with federal teeth, the authority the Board of Public Works was already exercising in May 1911. The price of finally doing what that little 1911 notice asked has been staggering. The remedial program is commonly put at roughly $590 million; through July 2024 the city had spent about $374.5 million of it, with 76 of 117 capital projects complete. To pay for it, the decree forced Lexington to create a stormwater Water Quality Management Fee in 2010 and to raise sanitary sewer rates repeatedly. Town Branch — the 1911 “huge cess pool” — got a 22-million-gallon underground storage tank to hold wet-weather overflow, and, above ground, the Town Branch Commons park that now traces the buried creek through downtown. The original 2026 compliance deadline has been pushed to December 31, 2030. And the program with the bureaucratic job of doing in 2026 exactly what the Board of Public Works did in 1911 — hunting down pipes that drain sewage where they shouldn’t — has an acronym now. It’s called Illicit Discharge Detection and Elimination, IDDE, and its stated purpose is “to detect and eliminate illicit connections and improper disposal of waste into the MS4” — the storm sewer system. Strip the acronym and it is the same sentence the Leader printed on May 8, 1911. The Board of Public Works will hereafter refuse to issue any more permits to tap storm water sewers. Lexington has been telling people to stop tapping the storm sewers since before the Town Branch plant existed, before Kentucky even counted its own typhoid dead, before a single one of the council members who blessed the “stretch our conscience” shortcut was out of office. The notice was four lines long. The bill came due a century later, and the city is still writing the check. Sources: Lexington Leader and Lexington Herald, 1910–1912 (public domain); Gary O’Dell, “The Disappearance of Town Branch”; Engineering News and Municipal Journal, 1905–1921; Kentucky State Board of Health Biennial Reports and Child Welfare in Kentucky (1919); United States and Commonwealth of Kentucky v. Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government, No. 5:06-cv-386 (E.D. Ky.); EPA and U.S. Department of Justice filings; LFUCG Division of Water Quality; CivicLex; lexingtonky.gov. 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