Monday’s Valley Grande City Council meeting didn’t promote any new items, but an old topic did come up as Mayor Tom Lee used his time to update council members and residents on an ongoing problem.

After the July 5 council meeting which addressed the sewage issue of the Overlook Hills housing area, Lee took time Monday to once again address that Phoenix Water Resources Trust, a nonprofit organization working with the complex, could not receive public funds from the city of Valley Grande for waste water improvements.

Phoenix, Lee said, is ineligible to receive public funds from the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, or ADEM, because it is a private company. Lee received information in the mail Friday from his attorney concerning the company.

“We were able to meet with the Phoenix Water group and … I’ve gotten a report back from our attorney, and they provided us with some additional articles of incorporation, some new stuff,” Lee said. “The attorney researched it, and they are basically a nonprofit 501C3 non eligible for public funds, the same thing we’ve been saying all along.

“There is nothing in those articles that allows us to dispatch money to them unless they’re working under contract with the city and the city is the owner of the system … (That) is the only way it could happen and we contract with them for maintenance and management,” Lee said.

In a previous statement to the Times-Journal, Lee said the $250,000 state legislative grant is a part of ADEM’s line-item budget specifically earmarked for Valley Grande’s waste water improvements, not solely for the Overlook community, as previously believed by Overlook residents. In Lee’s previously proposed comprehensive plan of $1.1 million for the city, a pump station will be placed near the already operating lagoon.

“It may not be the best thing in the world,” Lee said in a previous statement, “but it’s a plan and it’s legal.”

The city council also discussed future proposed plans of building a storm shelter in one of two possible locations within the city. If the council votes to receive funds from the state’s Emergency Management Agency’s $120 million-statewide fund specifically meant for city’s wanting to build tornado shelters, construction may not begin until 2014.