At the very least the town could front the water/sewer project with a myriad of financial instruments and then let people pay over time, credit those who didn't need it, etc, etc. That's what they do when they actually give a crap about getting the project done. I seen it with my own eyes when they took everyone off well/septic around here.

Buuuut, that doesn't accomplish the secondary goal of incentivizing the departure of black grandma who has crappy landscaping or car part out guy or whoever else owns their own house and won't be kicked by rent but whose means and standard of living are below the vision of some snooty Chicago suburb. There's always that undertone to these sorts of things.

And if it's not that there's some local business connections that are angling for things to be structured a given way. The dirt work guy with a cousin on the board would much rather see the town force people to incur thousands of $5k jobs that he'll surely get a cut of rather than have to bid a single contract with the same or less profit that he will not necessarily win.

PACER (mostly, of course they don't want to give the public a tour of the sausage factory) isn't juggling 2nd and 3rd tier goals that are so objectionable they can't be talked about like your municipality is.

And frankly I think PACER should be free specifically to enable bulk access so that all sorts of parties can sift through it, present the data, fact check against it, perform meta analysis, etc, etc.