ELECT TED KURT TO MAUMEE CITY COUNCIL
About MeMaumee Resident since 2008; Married; two children, three grandchildren Education: St. John’s High School, Toledo; University of Toledo College of Business; University of Toledo College of LawCommunity Service: Mock Trial coach, Perrysburg High School; Clinical research review board (oncology), University of Michigan
Professional Background
Bar Admissions: Ohio Supreme Court; Michigan Bar, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Ohio; U.S. Supreme CourtPrevious Professional Experience: Magistrate, Lucas County Domestic Relations Court; General counsel - Mercy Hospital Toledo, and St. Charles Hospital
Here are some of my concerns about Maumee
St. Luke’s
As I walked the neighborhoods last month collecting signatures for my nominating petitions, many residents expressed concern about our loss of comprehensive health care services. Our access to care became suddenly and unceremoniously limited when McLaren announced in March it was closing St. Luke’s Hospital in May.
Conant Street
The Conant Street Road Diet. Like it or not, the half-mile stretch of Conant Street, between the Trail and the bridge, looks a lot different from the way it looked a couple of years ago. And the traffic flow has changed.
There is no question but that downtown Maumee looks great. Someone even suggested we’re starting to look like Harbor Springs, Michigan - we just don’t have a Great Lake on the edge of town. But did we really need to turn Maumee into a Harbor Springs wannabe? And at what cost?
In dollars and cents, the financial cost has been significant; but the practical cost has also been nearly unaffordable. Conant Street went from four through-lanes to two (plus a center left-turn lane). When people ask who designed this I tell them I think it was a summer intern or maybe a high school student doing a senior project. At first I thought I was being facetious with my snarky response, but now I’m not so sure. There’s nothing funny about the fact that it can take up to twenty minutes to drive from Indiana & U.S. 25 in Perrysburg (Ft. Meigs Cemetery) to Conant & West Dudley (Dales) in Maumee.
Water bills
For decades the City of Maumee discharged sewage into the Maumee River in violation of Ohio Revised Code Chapter 6111 (Water Pollution Control) and the Federal Clean Water Act of 1972.
Although the City was required to report such sanitary sewer discharge events to the Ohio EPA, the required reports were not filed for twenty-four years, from 1996 until 2020. Mayor Carr has said that when we discovered the reporting failure (in July 2020) “we immediately contacted the Ohio EPA, who worked with City of Maumee, to outline an order to bring our city into compliance.”
On July 21, 2021 (a year after the reporting failures were discovered) the City approved Ohio EPA’s Final Findings and Orders. It wasn’t pretty - Maumee estimated that the resolution will take about 30 years to complete, and it will cost more than One Hundred Million Dollars ($100,000,000). Most of this amount is needed to remediate our sewer discharge facilities, but the Hundred Million Dollar estimate includes a fine of nearly $30,000 imposed by the Ohio EPA.
So if you’re wondering why your water bills have more than doubled recently, it’s because Maumee spent 2-1/2 decades breaking the law, and it will take another three decades to fix it.
So, yes - this a concern I have identified as a candidate for City Council. It also happens to be a concern here at home - my wife expresses her “concern” whenever I leave the faucet on too long! Win or lose, I’ll be hearing Mary’s “turn the water off” admonitions for a long time. (Don’t tell her I said this, but she’s right).
If elected, here are some of my goals and objectives
• First of all, and concerning healthcare, I am not a slick politician who will promise voters that “I intend to get City Council to force some health system to reopen St. Luke’s.” That’s what I won’t do - because I can’t. Maumee City Council just can’t pass an ordinance ordering the Cleveland Clinic or the University of Michigan to come into town and save the day.As a member of Council, however, I will be in a position to explore possible solutions that may get us closer to where we were at the start of 2023 - when we had a full service community hospital on Monclova Road.If I am elected to Council, I will be the only councilman with extensive experience in health care administration, and thus well suited to do what is needed keep Maumee (and our neighbors) from becoming an underserved healthcare community. • Second, and concerning Conant Street: I don't have a time machine (my grandson is working on one, but so far …). Seriously, my ideal solution would be to somehow magically restore Conant Street to the way it was just a couple of years ago. And although Conant Street is what it is and there’s no going back, what I can do is pay attention and sound the alarms next time the City comes up with some ambitious, grandiose, and expensive plan to fix something that isn’t broken.I think this project took everyone by surprise. I have not reviewed Council minutes from three or four years ago in an effort to determine if legally required notices were published, thus giving residents an opportunity to be heard; we have an excellent legal department here in Maumee, and I am 99.9% certain the notice requirements were issued by our lawmakers. But I think perhaps many of us, myself included, didn’t pay attention to the legal notices, and before we knew it, the project was underway and it was too late to turn back. There’s a lesson to be learned here - No matter who is seated on Council in January, all of us need to stay on top of what Maumee City Council is up to; so, if you see something you don’t like, you need to say something.• Third, and concerning the water bills: There is no question but that it was a shock for many residents when their water bills all of a sudden increased by nearly two-thirds. However, just as we can’t restore Conant Street to four lanes, neither can we do anything about the water bills. The fact is, we will have to spend $100 Million to rebuild our sewage system. Of course, had someone in the City administration noticed the problem two or three decades ago, I suppose we could have begun the repairs much sooner. The remediation would still have cost tens of millions of dollars; however had the repairs been made over ten or fifteen years, perhaps we might have seen gradual increases instead of a 64% jump from one billing cycle to the next.
My accomplishments on Maumee City Council
[This space is reserved. I expect to be seated on City Council in January 2024, following which I will begin to fill this space.]
Some Useful links for Maumee residents: