MSD Pays $8,000 to Mitigate Archaeological Dispute

The Louisville Metropolitan Sewer District (MSD) is paying $8,000 to the state’s office of archaeology. The money will be used to study artifacts found on property where pipe construction has been completed.The Army Corps of Engineers—which provided MSD with one of the permits used to run pipes through property near Floyd’s Fork—found that construction had disturbed an area of the site for further archaeology assessments. State archaeologists asked the district to stop until further studies could be completed.MSD and the company it contracted continued working with the necessary permits, said MSD spokesman Steve Tedder.“We were contacted by the Corps of Engineers the next day and asked to stop and we did. The site was then investigated while we did work outside of that site on the same project,” he said.Construction stopped until the site was fully assessed by state archaeologists. The Army Corps of Engineers then applied an $8,000 fee for the continued study of artifacts previously found on the site. That money is considered mitigation costs, said Tedder.MSD contracted with private archaeologists who found nothing significant on the site before construction, he said.