Why Should I Pay for Someone Else's $#!*?

Flush fee paying for local sewage upgrades
Fee increase could be on the horizon

Anne Arundel residents and businesses have been paying the state's "flush fee" since 2005, and now the money is starting to flow back into the county.

The Cox Creek sewage plant in Pasadena is getting a flush fee-funded upgrade to cut down on pollution. And in 2011, the Annapolis, Broadneck, Patuxent and Maryland City plants will start construction. Broadwater and Mayo will come later.

"There's a lot of work going on right now. The progress is going very well," said Bob Summers, acting state secretary of the environment.
Statewide, 16 plants have been upgraded, 15 are under construction and 29 are in design or planning stages.

The sewage plant upgrades will cut down the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus in the treated water that flows from the plants into rivers and the Chesapeake Bay.

A bit of background for non-Maryland (or even ignorant Maryland) readers.  The state of Maryland collects a Flush Tax of $30 a year for all water users in Maryland (they say sewer, but the tax applies to water systems that supply water to communities with septic systems).  The money ends up in the states hands, and the state is supposed to dole it back out to municipalities to upgrade their septic systems in an effort to protect the Bay.

Why can't cities pay for their own shit?  There are a lot of advantages to living in cities.  Jobs, schools, shopping, and lots of entertainment are close by.  Someone one picks up your garbage at the curb.  Someone pipes away your shit.   People choose to live in cities for those reasons and pay extra for many of those amenities.

Some of us choose not to live in cities, for other reasons.  Housing may be cheaper, the living simpler, with room to take the dog off the leash on the beach,  but you might have to go further to jobs, schools, shopping and entertainment.  We haul our own garbage to the transfer station.  And we pay for, and maintain our own mini-septic systems to take care of our shit.  Why should we help pay for the cities shit too?

They will argue that our turn will come, that eventually, after all the ancient municipalities have their systems finished with gold pipe (it's inert, you know, and won't rust away), there might be some left over to upgrade ours.  I don't believe that for a minute.  By the time the cities have all had their shot at the funds, it will be time to start again on the worst new offenders in the bigger cities.  The state will never use Flush Tax money to build a sewer system in Long Beach.