The group of Governor Francis Farms residents has every right to be upset.

In a letter to the Beacon last week, former Warwick Sewer Authority Chairman Tom Stone admits what everyone has known for a long time: that assessment rates to install sewers did not keep up with the actual costs until 2007.

That’s left the WSA in a fairly predictable situation: an approximate $6 million debt to the city, and regularly raising rates over the last 3 years.

Ironically, as Councilman Joseph Solomon observes, much has been made of the school department’s $2.3 million debt to the city, but little has been said about the WSA’s much larger deficit.

Unfortunately, those who weren’t the beneficiaries of the WSA’s failure to charge adequate amounts for sewer installation will be forced to pay for not only their fair share, but for those who had sewers put in before them.

That’s left the residents in Governor Francis Farms, and in other sections of the city irked.

A byproduct of sewers is that it’s supposed to increase the value of someone’s property by the approximate cost of the sewer assessment. When people think that won’t be the case – that they’re not getting what they’re being forced to pay for – they become rightly agitated.

Stone points out that the WSA might be headed for bankruptcy, an end that may become reality if the WSA doesn’t get the mandatory connection mechanism it needs. Currently about 5,000 connect-capable property owners are not tied into the system, meaning they aren’t sharing in what are basically fixed operational costs. But the WSA needs City Council approval to gain that fining mechanism as an incentive to force residents to tie in.

The council, which shot down a similar measure by a 9-0 vote in 2007, is reluctant. Asking council members to force constituents to tie into a sewer system in order to pay for past mistakes is a tough sell, and it remains to be seen if that will happen.

That, however, may be the only viable solution outside of bankruptcy. The late great novelist John Updike once wrote, “it’s fatal to begin a gesture and not go through with it”.

The authority has started down the path of mandatory connections and now it appears council inaction could leave them on the shoals of bankruptcy. The choice is up to the council.