mcre Media .......[Henry McClure Publisher]

Kansas rule first: surface discharge from an onsite system is illegal without an NPDES permit. KDHE will not issue that permit for one house. So every option either (a) sends the waste to a pipe or a plant, (b) puts a small drip/mound in the soil, or (c) hauls it. 1. Grinder pump + small-diameter force main (LPS) This is the “grinder” people mean. House waste drops into a 60–100 gallon basin. An E/One, Liberty ProVore, Zoeller, or Myers unit grinds it and pushes slurry through 1.25–2 inch pipe, uphill if needed, to the City main or to a package plant. Per-lot station, installed: about $3,000–$8,000 simple, $6,500–$12,000 in hard ground. Pump life: roughly 8–15 years. Replacement $1,600–$2,500 for an E/One-class unit. Power: on the order of $30–$80/year . Collection pipe is cheap compared with gravity sewer. EPA has said pressure collection can cut collection cost 50%+ versus gravity in bad terrain. Use it when: a City main exists, but it is uphill, across a creek, or ...

By Henry McClure, MCRE, LLC September 7, 2026 The hallway story is that you cannot put a septic tank in the city, and that inside the three-mile line the City can make you run sewer no matter what it costs. That is not what the book says. Topeka’s own code still has a septic path. Staff treat it like a museum piece. Developers treat it like it was repealed. It was not. This is the stretch map. 1. The city did not ban septic. It wrote a recipe for it. Class A is every plat inside the city limits . TMC 18.40.010(a). Class A still has four utility combinations. Two of them are septic or no-public-sewer: City water, no public sewer : preliminary plat on half-acre lots , Health Department perc tests each lot, lots laid out so they can be replatted later. TMC 18.40.020(b)(2). No City water and no public sewer , private well plus septic: preliminary plat on one-acre lots , perc tests, lots at least 150 feet in any direction , and a plat restriction that laterals stay 25 feet off t...

By Henry McClure, MCRE, LLC Topeka, Kansas September 7, 2026 Topeka has a habit. If you are the first one to build, you pay for the pipe. Then the City takes the pipe, bills every house that taps it for the next fifty years, and the next three plats connect like they invented gravity. That is not “protecting taxpayers.” That is making one private party capitalize a public system and then walking away from the revenue. What is actually commonplace On-site laterals and in-plat mains? Developer pays. That is normal. Almost every city in the country works that way. Off-site sewer to reach the tract? The first developer usually advances the money. Growth cities then do one of three things: they pay the oversize, they recapture from later connectors, or they put public money to the edge of the site because they want the tax base. Topeka often stops at the first sentence and skips the rest. The 2015 outside-city water and sewer rule is blunt: the total cost of extending sewer, includ...

The Gallon and the Check Henry McClure · MCRE Media · Topeka · September 2026 This is not a manifesto against factories. Reser’s employs about 1,500 people on S.E. 6th. Frito-Lay has been making snacks in Shawnee County since the 1950s. Goodyear has been on U.S. 24 since 1945. Mars built a chocolate plant here and still pays a large tax bill on the slice of the campus that is not exempt. Those facts stay on the page. This is a ledger. One column is the gallon. The other is the check — sales-tax cash, ten-year tax holidays, federal credits — already written under the same names. A third column is the house that pays $7.75 a thousand gallons and cannot deduct it. City Council is about to write the next four years of that ledger into the municipal code. Staff first proposed one price for the gallon. Industry objected. Staff came back with two prices and a higher house meter fee, and recommended that. If you only read one sentence before the meeting, read that one. The June list City...

Who actually sets the rates The Topeka City Council sets water (and wastewater and stormwater) rates by ordinance. The current schedule is in Topeka Municipal Code § 13.05.020. The last multi-year package was adopted in 2023 for 2024–2026; they are in another public rate process now for 2027 and beyond. That is the normal arrangement for a city-owned utility in Kansas. Kansas Corporation Commission (KCC) The KCC does not regulate municipal water rates. It regulates investor-owned (private) utilities — electric companies like Evergy, gas companies, and a handful of small private water systems (Suburban Water, Barton Hills, etc.). KCC’s own jurisdiction materials state that it does not regulate municipalities. Topeka’s water utility is city-owned, so it is outside KCC rate jurisdiction. State of Kansas — limited statutory overlay, not rate-setting Kansas statutes give cities the power to set their own rates and require those rates to be reasonable and sufficient to cover operati...

Frito-Lay (PepsiCo) Plant at 1303 SW 41st Street. One of their larger U.S. snack plants (Lay’s, Fritos, Doritos, Cheetos, Tostitos). They have publicly talked about cutting water use ~52% per pound of product since 1999 through process changes and sanitation practices. They were among the customers who noticed and complained when Kansas River chloride spiked in 2018, which is a sign they use city water in production, not just for restrooms. Mars Wrigley Chocolate plant in Kanza Fire Commerce Park (Topeka Blvd / Innovation Parkway area). Opened around 2014, later expanded (Snickers, Milky Way, 3 Musketeers, M&M’s lines). It was built as a LEED Gold facility with explicit water-efficiency targets: ~35% reduction in potable water use versus a baseline building, 71% reduction in water used for sewage, and no irrigation. Still a large process-water user. Reser’s Fine Foods (“Reesers”) Salad / refrigerated-foods plants and distribution, including the main salad plant at 3728 SE 6th...

Mark Reser does not publish a personal email on the company website. The address that counts is the mailroom in Beaverton. Reser’s Fine Foods, Inc. Attn: Mark Reser, Chief Executive Officer PO Box 8 Beaverton, OR 97075 Street / visitor address: 15570 SW Jenkins Road Beaverton, OR 97006 Main phone: 503-643-6431 Toll-free: 800-333-6431 Ask the operator for the Office of the CEO, or for Mark Reser’s assistant. That is how a letter gets opened. Official contact form: resers.com/about-us/contact-us Put “Attention: Mark Reser — Topeka water rates” in the subject and attach your letter. Emails the company itself prints consumeraffairs@resers.com — public correspondence GivinginBeaverton@Resers.com — headquarters community desk GivinginTopeka@Resers.com — Topeka Cares team (local plant people read this) marijo@resers.com — Mari Jo Prlain, Corporate Director, philanthropy, 503-526-5716 Their published names usually run first-name-plus-last-initial @resers.com. That would...