A lot can happen in 18 years.
Careers begin and end. Families grow and flourish. Legacies are created.
That’s what employees of Fort Wayne City Utilities celebrated late last year as they wrapped up the final projects under the 2008 consent decree with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Although the formal effort to clean up Fort Wayne’s waterways by improving its stormwater and sewage system spanned 18 years from 2008 to 2025, the consent decree itself was a culmination of more than a decade of dealmaking between local, state and federal officials.
All together, that’s nearly 30 years of research, planning, negotiation, coordination and construction.
The end result was a large-scale reduction in the number of combined sewage overflows into area rivers, particularly the St. Marys River. Sewage backup issues throughout area neighborhoods were also alleviated, and critical updates made to the city’s aging sewer infrastructure.
At the end of 2025, City Utilities announced a 94% reduction in sewer overflows since 2008. Data provided by the utility notes that this represents two billion fewer gallons of sewage dumped into the river each year.
Overall, that three-decade effort translates to more than 45,000 homes protected from basement backups and flooding; improved stormwater and sanitary sewer systems in more than 200 neighborhoods;a system that will prevent up to 1.8 billion gallons of combined sewage out of the river each year; and the 4.6-mile-long Deep Rock Tunnel – the most expensive public infrastructure project in city history and a cornerstone of what became known as City Utilities’ Long Term Control Plan.
“This was more than compliance — it was community transformation,” City Utilities Director Kumar Menon said in a statement. “Every project improved reliability and safety, reduced flooding and helped neighborhoods thrive. We now have one of the most resilient systems in the Midwest.”
Work started in earnest in 1995 after several Fort Wayne homes experienced multiple flooding incidents in a short amount of time. Plans to overhaul the city’s combined stormwater and sanitary sewer systems, which funneled rainwater and waste water into the same pipe, started under former Mayor Paul Helmke, and work continued under three different city mayors: Graham Richard, Tom Henry and Sharon Tucker.
Although flooding was a major concern for Fort Wayne residents, the Long Term Control Plan focused mainly on reducing the outfalls into the rivers. Sewer separation projects to reduce neighborhood flooding were done simultaneously with projects mandated by the consent decree.
But it was the people behind the scenes – City Utilities’ staff of engineers, designers, construction managers, GIS specialists and neighborhood leaders, who kept the Long Term Control Plan on track for 18 years, ensuring that all of the requirements laid out by the consent decree were delivered on time.
In February, WBOI sat down for interviews with some of those people to talk about their experiences and understand what the legacy of the Long Term Control Plan means to the people who made it a reality.
Paying for it
Years before a single shovel turned an ounce of dirt, City Utilities officials like Deputy Director of Finance Justin Brugger were trying to find a way to make the whole thing feasible. Brugger was brought on in 2006 to help perform affordability analysis.
“After you develop a few sets of alternative plans — the engineers work on that — then a lot if it’s about how much is this going to cost,” he said. “What’s it going to mean in terms of rates? What’s the socioeconomic impact going to be on the community?”
The EPA has guidelines about rates, which are updated every few years. At the time the city entered into the consent decree with the federal government, Brugger said the EPA’s position was that a community is not substantially burdened by a combined sewer overflow consent decree until sewer bills are 2% or more of the median household income of the service area.
In 2005, the overall cost of the Long Term Control Plan was estimated at about $240 million, Brugger said. The project came in about $100 million over that estimate. Matthew Wirtz, deputy director of engineering, said Brugger was tasked with estimating how much it would cost to operate the wastewater storage facility for 18 years, which came in at about $1 billion over that time in capital costs.
“And we were almost right on. We were just a little bit under,” Wirtz said.
He added that the Long Term Control Plan came in higher than anticipated partly due to construction costs increasing, but mostly because City Utilities ended up upgrading the water pollution control plant capacity to 100 million gallons per day instead of the originally planned 85 million gallons per day.
“We built higher levels of service. We built more capacity, the tunnel we sized 20% larger than we had originally planned,” he said. “One of our successes is from the beginning we tried to build that thing so that it didn’t just reduce overflows, it actually set up the capacity for economic development for the next couple of decades.”
Wirtz said he was a project engineer before joining the negotiation team toward the end of the process. He oversaw the entirety of the capital portion of the Long Term Control Plan for the entire 18-year span.
“It’s been fun to watch our team grow. Not only the engineering team, but the construction side and the operations team coming together,” he said, adding that the tunnel and many of the related projects were “big firsts” for City Utilities and Fort Wayne in general.
Brugger added that the consent decree helped City Utilities not just build pipes, but “pipelines of talent.”
“We had a pretty small engineering staff prior to that and we relied a lot on outside consultants,” he said. “In the early days of the Long Term Control plan, we brought in a program management team of consultants that worked here on site full-time and they helped train and mentor a lot of the staff.”
Engineering the solutions
Brugger said that helped City Utilities jump start and build the robust engineering team that it has today.
Engineer Kristen Buell started working with City Utilities as an employee of Arcadis in 2010 after graduating from Trine University. Arcadis was the firm tasked with program management for the planning phase of the Long Term Control Plan. She was hired by City Utilities in 2017 and began working on combined sewer projects before transitioning into a lead on building consolidation sewers designed to take water from combined sewer overflow and move it up to the Deep Rock Tunnel.
“I like to be part of a project full-circle,” she said. “When you work for a consultant you might only have part of a project, which is good, but an advantage of working with the owners, you get to be part of the full project lifecycle. So you get to help the decision-making and help guide the direction and planning, and you also get to help make the big decisions in design and construction.”
It’s not every day that an engineer gets to be a part of a project as massive and complicated as the Long Term Control Plan.
“Every engineer doesn’t get to build these massive structures and be a part of these large diameter sewers,” she said. “I got to experience that and help bring the system to a reality. Obviously I’m not the only one, there’s many players who did that, but I got to be a part of it.”
Buell also became a new mom in the middle of handling multiple large-scale projects. Looking back, she said “that’s what we were doing. There wasn’t a choice.” Projects needed to get done, but life also couldn’t be put on hold entirely. Every time she was preparing to go on maternity leave for each of her three kids, one of her big projects was about to start. That made it hard to disconnect for three months.
“It was a balance. I will say that I probably took some of that pressure home to the family, but not always. I would try to balance leaving work at work and being home when I’m home,” she said. “I think you have to be intentional about that.”
And even though most of the infrastructure she helped build goes underground where few people will ever see it, Buell said she’s proud to be able to share those accomplishments with her family.
Anne Marie Smrchek, manager of stormwater and sewer engineering, started at City Utilities at the very start of the Long Term Control Plan. She and her team were responsible for project design, neighborhood coordination and construction oversight.
“Initially, I was more focused on the stormwater side of things, flooding and all of those issues that come with it, but over time, those projects and teams became part of one bigger team,” she said.
Smrcheck said it’s been fun to watch her colleagues grow in their professional and personal lives.
“Everybody’s family is growing and things change, whether it’s getting their professional engineering license or picking up other certifications and other professional things, that’s been pretty awesome,” she said.
The scope of the project Smrcheck said is something she reflects upon with pride.
“It’s awesome to look back and say, ‘Look at what we’ve done for our community,’” she said. “I think that’s part of why we’re in public service. We want to make our community better.”
More than just the tunnel
Michael Saadeh has been with City Utilities for about 10 years and performed computer-aided design (CAD) work for many of the sewer separation projects that took place under the Long Term Control Plan. Prior to working for City Utilities, Saadeh said he worked at a private firm modeling for storm sewer projects. One of his first projects after coming on board, he said, was a manhole rehabilitation project along the St. Mary’s River.
Although the Deep Rock Tunnel is the project everyone’s heard of, Saadeh said he worked on numerous smaller projects designed to protect the city’s neighborhoods. One notable project was one he referred to as the ‘CSO 54’ project.
CSO 54 refers to a specific location along the combined sewer system where overflows discharge into the river. In this case, CSO 54 is located on the southeast edge of the city, near Decatur Road.
“We worked on installing storage tanks to help contain that flow,” he said.
Looking back, Saadeh said something that he was missing in the private sector before coming over to City Utilities was an answer to the larger question of, “Why are we doing this?”
Being hired by City Utilities and joining a team dedicated to making a difference for the community and neighborhoods was inspiring, he said.
Kyrou, a geographic information system analyst, has been with City Utilities for more than 20 years.
“While everyone was working on these great projects and things like that, we were maintaining the databases, so that way once they constructed them, we would do the mapping,” she said. “We want to make sure that we have everything mapped in the correct spot, so that way when they go out and fix things, we know how everything’s connected together.”
When Kyrou first started, she spent a lot of time digitizing the old paper maps. She was an intern in the GIS office before going to engineering and later returning to GIS. She said she’s glad the city invested in updated technology meant to streamline the process and improve communication.
“It’s just really neat to see everyone grasping the technology, even people who weren’t in that generation of having a computer, seeing them pick this up and then share it with other people,” she said.
At 36 years of service, Ron Sheppard, a City Utilities construction manager, remembers life before the Long Term Control Plan. He started as an inspector in December 1989, and after six years moved over to engineering. He said he’s been working on sewer projects, culverts, ditches and tunnel connections ever since.
“When I started, we still had pagers,” he said with a chuckle. “We didn’t have cell phones or anything else. We didn’t have computers at our desks. We didn’t have a whole lot of anything.”
In the 90s, when officials began to address Fort Wayne’s neighborhood flooding and combined sewer issues, Sheppard said instead of a digital sewer map on a computer, the records were in a 500-page book that had to be updated every 90 days by hand.
“Stone ages to now,” he said.
Decades of progress
Even before the 2008 consent decree came online, Sheppard said City Utilities was addressing the combined sewer issue in neighborhoods like the area around Irene and Lillian avenues.
“We had done big micro tunnels underneath the old parking lot at the old theater there, so we could capture that water before it got into the combined system,” he said. “We had done a number of those projects all over town, especially in the areas that were naturally low, just from the surrounding areas.”
For Sheppard and others, the thing that kept him up most at night was the worry that someone might get hurt, especially someone from the neighborhood where work was being done.
“You always worry that some kid is going to crawl over your fences and get in,” he said. “And you can only do so much to protect it.”
Over the course of 18 years worth of projects, crews saw their fair share of impatience, sometimes with dramatic results. Some of that happens even today, Sheppard said.
“You get people that will drive down other people’s yards, just because they want to get where they want to get to,” he said. “And it’s very hard to stop that.”
Nick Rupley, who is also a construction manager for City Utilities, oversaw several major projects since he was hired in 2018. One such project involved a series of three parallel pipes laid under the river to connect the combined sewer overflow site to the drop shaft servicing the Deep Rock Tunnel. And to add another layer of complexity onto an already complicated project, City Utilities accepted construction bids in the fall of 2020, just months before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Right when the project started, COVID hit and we had all of this uncertainty of, are we able to continue construction,” he said. “A couple weeks go by, they say yes, and then we build this project, which was a massive undertaking with teams of engineers on the contractor side and the city side as well.”
Further compounding things was what Sheppard described as “the delivery fiascos.”
“Nobody wanted to make pipe, you couldn’t get pipe back and forth, so that delayed,” he said. Sheppard added that Rupley’s team had to “quite literally wall off the river and go half-and-half to get across for his project.”
Rupley said it’s called a ‘coffer dam,’ or a series of steel sheets arranged in such a way to create a water-tight box in the middle of the river. Crews then lower an excavator into the box in the middle of the river and start digging. The dirt is removed via a container attached to a crane. And through it all, the project is at the mercy of the river.
“If the river rises too much, it floods our coffer dam and we’re done until the river goes back down,” Rupley said.
Like Sheppard, Rupely said safety was always a major worry. One morning, those worries became a reality. A group of kids had found their way into a 14-foot deep manhole filled with sewer gas. Rupley said the gas means there’s a lack of oxygen in the manhole, which could have caused them to pass out. It could have been weeks before anyone would find them. Police officers eventually located them and nobody was injured.
“Just things like that. No matter how much we had it locked up, they forced their way in,” he said. “They got really lucky.”
Much public focus was on the parts of the Long Term Control Plan people could see while traveling around Fort Wayne at any point between 2008 and 2025, but just as much work was happening out of view, as teams addressed the infrastructure required to store and treat 1.8 billion gallons of sewage that would otherwise go into the rivers each year.
Zach Schortgen, manager of facilities and energy engineering oversaw upgrades to the water pollution control plant on Dwenger Avenue. He said he was just out of college when he started working on the first major plant improvement project – a $32.4 million expansion that increased the water pollution control plant’s treatment capacity from 60 million gallons per day to 100 million gallons per day.
“I started out in the field and I got to spend three years out there helping with construction management and watching it get built,” he said. “That’s where I learned about the plant, about the processes and how they build stuff.”
At first, Schortgen said his perspective was less about the overall Long Term Control Plan and more “project and execution focused.” But that began to change.
“As the years went on I learned what the master picture was and where we were trying to add,” he said. “Once I had more knowledge of that I could be more helpful in providing input for design and planning and coordination of all the things that had to happen.”
By the time Engineer Chris Ravenscroft came on board in 2014, many of the major plant upgrades were underway. It was interesting, he said, to learn why City Utilities was making “such significant upgrades to a facility that’s been around such a long time.”
“It has been enjoyable to see it come through and to help with actually executing the last few projects in the plan and see it come to completion,” he said.
Schortgen said he and Ravenscroft have had the unique opportunity to experience the development of the Long Term Control Plan from both the field and the water pollution control plant. They’ve gotten to learn how everything connects, he said.
“It was all extremely important and none of it could be done independently,” he said. “It was just different types of work, but I think I (came to) appreciate more the synergy between the two.”
When all put together, Schortgen said although it all felt like business as usual at the time, “we were trying to remodel the kitchen while we were making Thanksgiving dinner.”
Treating wastewater is mostly a biological process, Schortgen said, which means it is a living system that must be grown and maintained. That means the system also comes with limits on how much material it can process.
Schortgen said a lot of time was spent balancing the amount of organisms that need to exist and how much storage space is required to treat the necessary amount of water. Those projects were done in conjunction with other upgrades designed to increase capacity, accommodate increases in water and waste, and deal with solid material that can’t be passed on to the river. One of those projects now helps capture methane generated from the treatment process, which is then used to help power the treatment plant.
“Some of the things we’ve done along the way that were just part of our world are pretty incredible things,” Schortgen said.
Neither Ravenscroft nor Schortgen thought they’d end up working in wastewater treatment while studying engineering. Both originally wanted to work on engines. But life’s twists and turns led them to City Utilities for various reasons. They stayed because they believed in their ability to do something good for a community of people.
“One of the first commands given by God to man was to take care of and steward the world well,” Ravenscroft said. “And that’s what we’re doing here from a water standpoint. And as we steward our water well, we steward our population and the people around us well, as well as the environment.”
Schortgen joked that it’s not about “money, fame or power.” “It was an opportunity to do really good things that I’m called to do,” he said. “That’s what’s kept me here so many years and perhaps a few more.”